You are who you practice being

This exhibition emerges from a profound reflection on personal and collective transformation. The title, taken from an artificial intelligence response about the most brutal truths of psychology — “You are not who you think you are; you are who you practice being” — synthesizes the central axis of this project that William Gaber has developed over the past two years. The exhibition began to take shape in 2024, during an artist residency in Onomichi, Japan, in collaboration with a program focused on restoring abandoned houses. From this experience, Gaber delves into the study of architectural abandonment as a metaphor for change, migration, and identity transformation. This phenomenon, also present in his home state of Yucatán, raises questions about who we were, who we are, and who we may become. His work explores resilience, metamorphosis, and the possibility of conscious change. Sometimes transformation is inevitable — due to the passage of time or life events — but other times, we choose to change: to move, to reinvent ourselves, to “shed our skin.” Where does that transformation occur? What spaces — physical or symbolic — do we inhabit as we become another version of ourselves? Architecture, understood as living memory and emotional container, is a key element in this exhibition. Through basalt stone sculptures, modular structures that evoke lattices or building blocks, and a series of paintings produced during the residency, Gaber constructs a visual language that articulates body, space, and time as stages of change. You Are Who You Practice Being is an invitation to reflect on the spaces we leave behind, the forms we adopt as we move, and the new containers we inhabit to reinvent ourselves.