PRIMORDIAL is an exhibition developed by TANAT (@l_tanat_l) in collaboration with Sergio López and Nicolás Cuéllar Camarena, presented at ARCHIVO Diseño y Arquitectura Museum, in Mexico City during March 2019.

In the face of an indifferent contemporary society which is increasingly detached from the environment and from its own origins, three symbolic geographies of Mexico City are being reflected: the valley, the lake and the volcano. The Xaltepec Volcano has been excessively exploited for mining extraction. Lake Chalco is the last body of water from the enormous Lake of Tenochtitlan, dried in order to urbanize Mexico City throughout the last 500 years. Mount Tlaloc is a part of the eastern valley that surrounds the city, which its forests had been destroyed to become agricultural fields, becoming at last, a complex of stone quarries located in the subsoil. 

PRIMORDIAL takes the stone remnants that are extracted from the sites in question and converts them into architectural models. Each piece exhibits a reverse chain process of the industrial transformation that occurs on these landscapes; it is a return to what is primary, what is PRIMORDIAL. This critical view to the way we, as a modern society, approach territory, clarifies the concept of “what is left” on the extinct landscapes and on a surpassed city. 

Along with photographs of the models’ interiors, and video projections of the endangered territories, PRIMORDIAL speaks of the transformative power of design from the notion of utopia and invites to critically visualize a different form of the present. 

IGNORED PAST| SEDIMENTED PRESENT| UNCERTAIN FUTURE

T A N A T is an architecture, art, and research practice based in Mexico City, founded and directed by Diego Rivero Borrell.