The Museo Anahuacalli combines nature and culture in a typically Mesoamerican fashion, acting as a dual physical reference between mountain and pyramid, volcano and temple. The rock that the building is made of comes from the lava produced by the eruption of Xitle, a volcano that destroyed Cuicuilco, one of many pre-Hispanic cities that preceded Mexico City. The root of its name, which conveys the now ambiguous sound of the Aztec word anahuac (surrounded by water), connotes the incorporation of early civilizations that flourished in this region before and after Xitle, in the southern part of what was once the lake-filled region of the Valley of Mexico; that fertile basin that is not actually a valley.

This strange and marvelous Museum created by Diego Rivera (geographically and culturally anahuac) contains an incredible compendium of what humanity -motivated by necessity and hope, love, fury and madness- is capable of forming on Earth. But Bosco Sodi: Elemental is not about this extraordinary material culture, rather, it is directed to the part of the museum that is prehistoric, anachronistic even: rock and heat, the volcano and its sublime beats. Succeeding in attaining beneath, before, beyond, and outside of history something more basic and fundamental: matiérisme paintings, volcanic rocks and cubes of clay by Sodi cut through the culture of matter like a river that rapidly flows across a floodplain. These are not products of the earth, but the presence of Earth itself.

Rivera’s genius lay in his ability to recognize in anahuac what the French call terroir, a unique combination of environmental features that constitute an identity that is inseparable from location: rock, earth, breath, blood, the quality of light. Sodi is interested in what will happen if we could be induced to allow the gears of our collective intellect to grind to a halt -if we were to bury our feet in the sand, turn our faces to the sun and pause to watch the lava flow. What, Sodi wonders, would it mean to simply be a part of where we are?