DG:  The idea behind the show was to bring together two different artists with similar concerns — like rock 'n roll — but different processes. I typically use drawing more than other media, and in Mexico, almost everyone knows me for my drawings. I've only made four videos in my career, but this exhibition includes those works alongside other retrospective pieces; one of the drawings is from 1994, but the last ones, the big drawings, are from 2007. Right now, I feel more at peace with myself and my work. With a show like this, you have the opportunity to review your work, and you can see the different developments and what the best option is for the future.

DG:  I'm about to start a new series of drawings. I use India and Chinese ink, but I love pencil and acrylic as well. I want to make large-scale drawings, but also to layer the works with different techniques and to create some kind of homage to different artists who inspire me, like Pier Paolo Pasolini, William Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski. That would be the center of the experience, but I want to mix my personal vision with that influence.

DG:  For the Berlin Biennial, I'm showing drawings and a sculpture. For the sculpture, Brutal Youth, I used old furniture and an old door from my home to make a very simple piece, like a monolith. I also used a Devo record cover because those covers have a very cooperative attitude, which reflects the way I mix things in that piece. In the drawing series, How to Make a Monster, I used a style recalling German expressionism. I love those artists, like Otto Dix and George Grosz. I love the way they made their work — the aesthetic, how they always tried to address economic and political issues — and I wanted to make something that related to all that. The biennial is a good moment for using that influence. I didn't have the opportunity to go to Berlin before the biennial, but all this time, I've had this stylistic background in me and these artists that I admire, so it's nice to be able to approach these drawings and sculptures in relation to the city and its history.

DG:  In Double Album, for example, I have some very old sculptures. In my older work, I usually used very basic materials that I found on the street and around me. Once, when I was living in a little room in Mexico, I had an idea to fill up the entire space with work, and so I made all these specific pieces for the room. I put all these pieces around the room — in my bed, on my table. The idea was that, finally, all the pieces would make it impossible to live there anymore. I wanted to move; I had been living there for eight years, and it was a very dark, small room. For those pieces, I used very simple things like beer cans, or this bucket I found in the room — whereas my new pieces aren't made from found or gathered things, but specifically from new materials. A recent sculpture, Untitled (Spider mMan), is made from a material that some people will recognize as being used for security windows in Mexico City.

DG:  When I made Burn, I was having an exhibition in New York, at Lombard-Freid [in 2004], and music was at the center of it. Raw Power was in that show. I was referencing record covers and songs, and in Burn, I referenced the Deep Purple cover where the front photograph has all the band members as candles, and on the back, they've melted. I made a candle of myself, and two stacks of newspapers represented the Twin Towers. It's a very simple, but very personal approach to a historical moment.

DG:  When you have love for a work, you have it all of your life. As I said earlier, I love Burroughs and Bukowski, but I also love Latin-American writers like Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roberto Bolaño, who's one of the last of the really great writers. He lived in Mexico for a long time and has a very strong and fresh vision of the city and of this bohemian moment around Mexico — specifically in The Savage Detectives — and I love it. I carry all these influences with me all the time.

DG:  The first video I made was Momentos Irrepetibles (Unrepeatable Moments). At that time, I'd seen a lot of Bruce Nauman's works, and I saw this video about his performances. I wanted to make a simple self-portrait — just the camera and my face while I'm singing. I selected some music that I loved, and the work is an exercise of the memory, of how I feel in connection with that music. All the videos have very simple uses of the camera. I don't try to use techniques — I leave it very low-tech.

DG:  La búsqueda del ombligo is a series of 13 drawings on paper mounted on wood, which took me two years to complete. In this series in particular, I wanted to directly reference my Mexican heritage, like Aztec iconography and my love for José Clemente Orozco, the Mexican muralist — he's my favorite artist. I use the same scale that Orozco used for his murals, and the panels are divided because Aztec sculpture was very geometrical; size is very important to the pieces. I integrated the influence of these Mexican icons and put them together with my love for music. For me, it seems very natural to mix different kinds of influences. I grew up in downtown Mexico City, in a very old, working-class neighborhood. When I was growing up, I saw comics, Mexican comics, newspapers, sports magazines. I didn't go to art school and discover popular culture; it was already all around me.