From the mid-1970s until her death in 1990, Pola Weiss Alvarez developed a unique style of video art that combined visual effects, dance, and sound, rooted in her local context and identity, helping to establish this art form in Mexico. Born in Mexico City in 1947 to an Alsatian father and a Mexican mother, P. Weiss earned degrees in political science and communications from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1975. During a period when Mexican intellectuals and politicians debated television content and management, P. Weiss called herself a teleasta (television artist) and proposed experimental video production as an alternative to commercial TV. She created a diverse range of programs and experimental videos, both independently, through her company artTV (1976), as well as in collaboration with state-owned and private broadcasters.

Echoing the work of other female video artists internationally—especially Shigeko Kubota (1937-2015), with whom she was in contact—P. Weiss developed her own categories to understand her emerging practice and the novelty of video as an art form, such as “video sculptures” and “video diaries.” In Flor cósmica [Cosmic Flower] (1977), her first video, shown that same year at the International Encounter IX of Video Art and National Encounter I of Video Art in Mexico, P. Weiss’s characteristic use of video effects, playful wordplay, and an embodied relation to the video camera began to emerge. A year later, in a graphic manifesto accompanying the exhibition of the videos Mujer-ciudad-mujer [Woman-City-Woman] (1977) and Somos mujeres [We are women] (1977) at the 1978 February Biennial at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, P. Weiss claimed the vagina as the site of video production and named her camera escuincla (Náhuatl for “daughter”), asserting her self-sufficiency and independence as a video artist. Shortly thereafter, P. Weiss began to dance with her portapak in hand during public performances that incorporated live video feedback with multiple cameras and mirrors, challenging media boundaries between herself and her audience. Her live dance performances, or videodanzas, as she called them, contributed to the international development of videodance (or screendance) as a video art genre. In 1986, she created her most well-known video, Mi co-ra-zón [My Heart] (1986), a heartfelt response to the devastation of Mexico City following the 1985 earthquake and her own abortion.

Articulating video art as a medium of self-knowledge, P. Weiss regarded her portapak as an extension of her body, a prosthetic for a mother-daughter relationship, a substitute for a sexual partner, and a way to assert self-sufficiency. She produced over 35 videos and participated in various international video art festivals and exhibitions, including the Video Art and Performance Festival in Venice (1979) and Pola Weiss Mexico at the MonteVideo art gallery in Amsterdam (1979). In Mexico, her work remained in obscurity for most of the 1990s, due to limited interest in video art as well as myths about her eccentric personality and suicide. In 2012, Edna Torres Ramos, one of her students, catalogued and donated a collection of videos previously held at TV UNAM, along with other personal documents, to ARKEHIA, an art-documentation center at the University Museum of Contemporary Art MUAC, making P. Weiss’s work publicly accessible.