In The Future Was When? (2009) Esquivias organizes a complex narrative of urban space around the tiling of subway stations in Madrid and New York. She reads ceramic tiling as a conceit for an individual’s relationship to the fading modernist organization of space, and for tracing the grand and now uncertain legacy of urbanism between two branded and networked metropolises. This project unfolds out of a dialogue between Esquivias—who for years has observed abstract patterns in the tilework of the Madrid subways, the result of official repairs with tiles that don’t quite “match” the originals—and Susan Brown, who in the 1980’s made surreptitious “illegal repairs” to decaying ornate mosaics in New York’s subway. Brown’s new tiling—a kind of selfless graffiti that, rather than asserting individuality, discreetly worked into the restoration of a tiled grid—eventually resulted in contracts to manufacture replacement mosaics for the New York subways and souvenir panels for sale at the New York City Transit Museum. As Madrid now replaces its tiled station walls with anti-corrosive and graffiti-resistant Vitrex sheets, the city will preserve one tiled station, albeit as a nonfunctional museum, a kind of historical souvenir. Esquivias asked Brown a series of questions that seem at once both very simple and yet also completely ridiculous, tracing an obscure relationship between herself, a young artist based in Spain and Mexico, and Brown, who came of age in the 1980s East Village art scene. Folded into the work are excerpts from a blockbuster film, Steven Spielberg’s 1987 Batteries Not Included, about small robots from outer space that save an East Village building from a developer and gentrification by surreptitiously repairing the building, as well as references to the “I ♥ New York” campaign, a marketing strategy designed to brand the city of New York.