¡Cuidado! X Arriaga Cuellar + Adán Vallecillo

¡Cuidado! presents a series of video performances commissioned by X Arriaga Cuellar and Adán Vallecillo. Each performance, made during a year-long process of research and community outreach, describes singular movements abstracted from the daily routines of Honduran migrants working as home care aides in New York City.

Collaborators Arriaga and Vallecillo invited five women to perform modified versions of their daily tasks, producing six actions displayed across multiple projections in the gallery. These performances were designed in collaboration, and focus upon specific roles and responsibilities that care workers navigate every day, such as bathing, medication management, and repositioning patients to prevent bedsores.

In the videos, each action is taken out of its daily utility and transformed into ritualized movements and social practices of migrant care workers. The actions oscillate between meditative and mundane: one woman engages with a pill dispenser as if it were a time dial, while another takes her own blood pressure, pressing the bulb in rhythm with a soft melody she hums. In Spanish, ¡Cuidado! means both Caution! and Care. This duality signals the complex nature of such work, and the formal choreographies of often-unseen labor.

Organized by X Arriaga Cuellar, ¡Cuidado! was presented originally at Performance Space New York. The exhibition is dedicated to Mabel Vallecillo.

About the Artists

X Arriaga Cuellar is a multi-disciplinary artist, archivist, and curator based in New York City. Their curatorial work focuses on Central American performance and visual art, grounded in a research-based practice that prioritizes cultivating relationships with artists and experimenting with curatorial methodologies that challenge traditional institutional norms. X is the co-curator and founder of “Cinco Estrellas,” an archive dedicated to the collection and preservation of Honduran cultural memory. They have presented curatorial projects at Performance Space New York, Centro Cultural de España Tegucigalpa, and Museo para la Identidad Nacional in Honduras.

Adán Vallecillo (b. 1977, Honduras) has worked at the forefront of Central American creative and political praxis for more than two decades. Grounded in on-site research, Vallecillo’s work bridges sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, and video. By repurposing found industrial materials and labor, Vallecillo’s work transforms everyday situations and objects into subjects of reflection. Vallecillo’s work is collected by major international public and private collections, including: CIFO Foundation, Miami, FL; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, NY; Sayago & Pardón, Los Angeles, CA; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica; Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, CA; and Daros-Latinamerica, Zürich, Switzerland, among others. He has participated in biennials in Montevideo, Guatemala City, Curitiba, Venice, Havana, and Cuenca.