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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Chavis Mármol grew up with the two pearls of this story in his paternal grandmother’s house. The sculpture is a tribute to them. He exhibited the piece at Zsona Maco, at the JO-HS gallery. Chavis was looking for an intimate and raw introduction. I wrote this text based on what he told me: childhood memories, admiration for their twin uncles… We printed it on shiny pink paper, like the pearls—like the uncles—and we read it at the fair in front of the sculpture, which is also an offering.

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