by 

NORA BARÓN

At the Nora Barón Museum, she’s messed with us — elegantly. The everyday doesn’t quite fit; she tries, but that’s how her interventions are. We look twice, smack our foreheads, look again — and yes: it was. In the museum space, Nora Barón drops a link: each visitor enters her app-web and decides which WTF will happen next. Friend, AI-generated jokes. Bad, unexpected, unrepeatable — and perfectly Nora.

Her work has that ability to unseat you: that not-funny humor, that sudden forgetting of what you were about to say, that odd gesture when you don’t quite understand a foreign language, that instant when something feels urgent and then suddenly doesn’t matter anymore, or that other one when you had a shitty piece of advice ready but forget it because someone just asked you — what, exactly? The wrong Joker. What seems like a simple decision can lead to gloriously awkward results. Take part in the experience, the experience. Fuck.

Because what happens is simple: the link was there, you activated the experience, but the bond between what was “meant” and what actually “happens” cracks. A subtle beauty in the stumble, in that brief discomfort of “what’s happening?” which is really “what just happened?” And I think of you, visitor: you enter with either minimal or maximal expectations — maybe you expected nothing, maybe everything — and suddenly the floor that felt solid doesn’t seem so anymore. I’m not sure it was a good idea to bring Nora in. Every time we do, bruh. But maybe that’s how it should be. 

There’s a sexy fissure between intention and result, in that instant when everything falls apart and we stay there, watching. Seriously: fuck.