New York City · Est. 2022
Creating space for truth.
A listening-led artistic research practice that centers humans as the primary material. Conversations, installations, and experiences that interrupt the conditions that keep us isolated. What happens when we name our truths, and listen, really listen, to other people's truths?
The Practice
What is Conscious Intervention?
Conscious Intervention is a collective experiment in imagination, courage, and fidelity to what could exist but doesn't, yet.
It begins from a simple truth: people are the experts of their own lives, and their lived experience is the foundation for understanding a place, its tensions, and its possibilities.
The practice is informed and builds knowledge through listening and one-on-one conversations that reveal the conditions that shape how participants live, connect, and navigate their realities. As these stories accumulate, they form an oral history of a community in a specific moment in time. A textured, nuanced understanding that no survey or external analysis could produce.
This collective knowledge becomes the starting point for imagining new ways of relating.
From here, the practice proposes interventions: temporary, evolving, context-shaped experiments designed to interrupt familiar systems and allow people to experience themselves and others differently.
Participants return to test prototypes, offer feedback, and influence each next iteration. The process remains fluid, iterative, and grounded in the realities of the people who make it possible.
This is not research done on people.
It is artistic research done with them.
Stories Archive
The conversations so far.
Each walk was recorded with permission. Anonymous, unedited, and shared so others can listen, and feel less alone in the experience of being human. Stories are organized by city. Click play to listen.
Pittsburgh, PA
Seattle, WA
Or, record from where you are
Can't meet in person? Send a voice note.
You have a story worth telling. You've been carrying it for a while now.
Record yourself for up to 10 minutes. No script. No performance. Just you and whatever's true right now. Something you've been meaning to say, something you've never told anyone, something you keep almost saying but don't.
Record directly from your phone or computer, or upload a voice note. Submissions are anonymous. If your story resonates, it may become part of the Conscious Intervention archive.
By submitting you agree that Cruz may share your story publicly as part of the Conscious Intervention archive. No names. No identifying details without your explicit consent. Just the truth of it.
Selected Works
Projects in the world.
Conscious Intervention, NYC
A collective performance art piece built through encounters with strangers across difference. Each conversation becomes part of a larger body of work that seeks to piece together a clearer picture of our world and the human experience.
Unsaid
A continuation of the Voicing Booth project in Sarajevo, redesigned for Washington Square Park. Shaped by the local context the art installation invited strangers to share what they never say aloud. More than one hundred voices revealed the private emotional undercurrents of New York City.
masa
masa brings together people who might otherwise never meet. Through dialogue across identities and co-designed experiences, it invites vulnerability, trust, and an opportunity to step outside of your social bubble with complete strangers.
OurStories
A social experiment on the fear of others. A collection of conversations with strangers about their beliefs and the human experience. Dismantling the fear of others one conversation at a time.
Voicing Booth, Sarajevo
"What's something that you never say aloud?" In a region shaped by war, migration, and inherited silence, the participatory installation invited people to courageously name what has long been unspoken within themselves, their families, or their communities.
Claverito
Empowering an amphibious community: mitigating barriers through participatory design for increasing access to public services in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.
Atmospheres
Collection of atmospheres captured across cultures: moments that reveal conditions and sensations in the built and natural world that can shape connection and emotional response.
About
Cruz.
Cruz
Juan José Cruz is a queer Mexican architect turned human-centered designer and the founder of Conscious Intervention. He holds a Masters in Human-Centered Design & Engineering from the University of Washington.
His practice is grounded in lived experience. As a 2025 Humanity in Action Fellow in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he studied how vulnerability, conflict, and memory shape civic life. In rural Pennsylvania, he organized home care workers across political divides and saw how deep listening and shared struggle can shift relationships that seem fixed. In the Peruvian Amazon, he led participatory research with Claverito, an informal amphibious community formed through the displacement of indigenous families from the rainforest into urban conditions they cannot afford.
Across these contexts, Cruz has developed a global understanding of belonging, positionality, isolation, and how trust is built across difference. He works through deep listening, shared experience, vulnerability, and atmospheres, treating participants as equal partners in each intervention.
His work is in quiet dialogue with thinkers like Alain Badiou, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Gabor Maté, Robert Greene, Eckhart Tolle, and Peter Zumthor on love, honesty, presence, power, and atmosphere.
Artist Statementconscious intervention is a result of the awareness and exploration of the forces and systems that shape the world around us, and a commitment to reimagining them.
my practice was started with curiosity and a desire to engage in dialogue across identities. taking the time to listen to others and to decenter myself has transformed the way i relate to the world, and is at the core of my practice.
in the consideration of western values and its emphasis on the individual, i found refuge in thinkers such as alain badiou, whose philosophy of love and politics gave foundation to an otherwise perceived delusional narrative of what could be, but isn't, yet.
my practice and approach are not only rooted in the degrees and stamps of approvals of institutions, but also by a path of self-inquiry and the courage to question my own internalized limiting beliefs, the continued deconstruction of the savior complex, and a commitment to nurturing of pluralistic principles.
each intervention informs the other. my own internal transformation is documented as a way to position myself and understand my role within each intervention.
i am guided not only by data, but also by intuition and a philosophical and ethical commitment to equity, collective liberation, and the belief that humanity can reorganize itself beyond capitalism.
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