Eleven days.
I was invited to do a solo exhibition in Tokyo. Back then I was seeing a Japanese girl, and when the install was done I stayed on painting graffiti with friends: the monorail at Dreamland Nara — an abandoned amusement park we slipped into past security — an abandoned Love Hotel, and illegal spots up high in Shibuya. The day after Nara, other friends who had gone in after us got caught.
I was arrested in the city. They told me it would be twenty days of pre-trial detention and that, according to the court-appointed lawyer — I had no money to pay for another — it could run to six months. Total panic.
An official from the Spanish embassy came. «Tenía cara de japonés pero era argentino y hablaba con acento argentino, lo cual me voló la peluca.» He told me the only thing that works in Japan: tell the truth and show remorse.
I went to court twice, by bus, chained together with the rest of the prisoners. The second time I broke down crying in front of the prosecutor, through an interpreter. The lawyer reached an amicable settlement with the complainants. The cell — white, all white, «un trip muy loco» — I shared with two Japanese men who only spoke Japanese; they had robbed an izakaya at gunpoint. My girlfriend came for visits and they would shout at her, because only Japanese could be spoken there.
On day eleven they let me go without warning. «Estaba mentalizado para más de seis meses — fue duro.» Five years later I went back to Japan and had no problem at all.
«A veces hace falta una experiencia ultra dura para salir mejor.»
«Ahí me tomé muy en serio mi carrera como artista. Empecé a estructurar cosas.»
«Durante años conté que el manifiesto lo escribí en la celda. No es verdad: lo había firmado un año antes en València. Lo que pasó en la celda fue más serio — me di cuenta de que una cosa es manifestar y otra accionar. Al salir, accioné.»
A correction from the artist himself, July 4, 2026. The old version survives in interviews from the period; it is kept on the manifesto page, labeled as what it is: the legend.
Nineteen pages photographed years later. Among them, the official diagram of Japanese criminal procedure with the dates noted by hand — arrest and release marked exactly eleven days apart (the year, 2013 or 2014, is still to be fixed) — and the notebooks where the studio's language is being invented in ballpoint pen: angular forms, signature studies dated «’14».
The diagram of the process, annotated: exactly eleven days between arrest and release.
Left open, honestly: the exact year — 2013 or 2014 — is being pinned against the date of the Manifiesto Ultradinámico (signed in València, Nov. 2013). Felipe names the exhibition «Perpetual Mobile», at the Fifty-Five DSL gallery; the registry documents «Perpetuum Mobile», Studio55 (2014). Neither discrepancy is resolved — both are flagged, not forced into a tidy close.
As told by Felipe Pantone, July 4, 2026.