María José Casazza and Athenea Papacostas

The MAX Temporary Exhibitions Gallery presents Que el manantial de un río extraño sea tu ombligo. With curatorial accompaniment by Sandra Sánchez, the exhibition features works created collaboratively by María José Casazza and Athenea Papacostas, taking as its point of departure a reading of the goddess Tlazoltéotl.

The exhibition presents itself as a living, moist organism. Its geographic and symbolic center functions as a primordial scar, a testimony to a separation and the trace of a connection. From this core, the artists construct a ritual that transforms it into a creative spring, a source that fuses matter and memory.

This proposal is born from a collaboration that rejects the myth of the individual genius, weaving a many-handed dialogue in which singular authorship dissolves into an act of collective listening and response. The exhibition is nourished by two main references: the Huastec goddess Tlazoltéotl—symbol of creative ambivalence—and “Initiation Chant of the Finders’ Lodge,” a poem by Ursula K. Le Guin that invites us to embrace the strange in order to reconnect with what is our own. Together they shape a space where the sacred dwells in the living, the navel opens like a generative crater, and composting becomes a political act.

— Sandra Sánchez

The project has received the support of the Jumex Foundation for Contemporary Art.