"Every new freedom begins with a sacrifice," reads a line from the poem that accompanies Pray (2022), an installation by Korakrit Arunanondchai composed of two audiovisual pieces co-directed in 2021 with Alex Gvojic: Songs for Dying and Songs for Living. The phrase, borrowed from anarchist philosopher Simone Weil, appears just as apocalyptic images emerge—visions of a lost world’s past. In that bygone time, military figures with black wings glide across deserted landscapes on electric scooters. Pray is an omen, revealing the ruins of a civilization that devolved into imprisonment and policing, where only a few beings survive to reawaken the sacred in the world.

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The sun sits high in the sky. The light is so intense that, upon entering the Anahuacalli, I’m briefly blinded. This darkness, born of volcanic depths, leaves black splotches before my eyes—splotches that blur the faces of the Olmec, Toltec, and Nahua figures behind glass. The exhibition ¿Cómo se escribe muerte al sur? [How Is Death Written in the South?]*1, by Paloma Contreras and Carolina Fusilier, stretches across the museum in such a way that one encounters the pieces through disorientation. There’s always been something ominous about the Anahuacalli project: to build a portal for speaking with the dead, with other planes of existence (perhaps that’s the museum in its most utopian definition). And I don’t just mean Diego Rivera or Juan O’Gorman—I mean speaking with El Pedregal, with the lava upon which this house between two seas stands. For this exhibition, the museum has become what curators Karla Niño de Rivera and Samantha Ozer describe as the stage of a fictional thriller. Time here moves in unfamiliar ways.

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Fortuitous or not, a nursery and an art gallery intertwine today in a braid whose political coordinates seem to defy mere chance.

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Imagine falling, but there’s no ground.

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