A Guided Tour Through the Animist Museum of Lake Texcoco

What you are about to experience is a narrated tour of a particular kind of museum, accounting for a contested place in the center of Mexico: a museum which is not a museum about a lake which is not a lake.

Commented Bibliography

– Bennett, Tony. Introduction to The Birth of the Museum, 1–13. New York: Routledge, 1995.

The Animist Museum of Lake Texcoco differs from modern museological practices as Tony Bennett has interpreted them: museums, while formed, proceeded from chaos to order emulating science’s progression from error to truth (p. 2). As the present guided tour unfolds, the conditions differentiating an animist museum from a modern historical museum are established by means of imagined scenarios or incitements: thus, this museum plays on the idea of uncertainty instead of accommodating objects to a pre-determined order.

– Garuba, Harry. ‘On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism, and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections.’ e-flux Journal 36 (2012). Accessed 1 May, 2016. http://www.e-flux. com/journal/36/61249/on-animism-modernity-colonialism-and-the-african-order-of-knowledgeprovisional- reflections/.

An animist museum, at first glance, may seem like a counterintuitive idea: historical museums (such as the Anthropology Museum of Mexico City) might seek to subsume their objects to the gaze of a certain subject through fixed taxonomies and power structures; the animist worldview escapes those structures as it considers everything as alive, soulful, person-like. In this guided tour, animism is revealed as a maneuver in tension with the modern spirit of such museums, rather than simply opposed to it. Garuba’s revision of animism may be helpful in understanding such a tension, as he presents animism in the manner of a ‘spectral Other’ embedded in the modern, haunting and challenging it from within.

– Lather, Patti. ‘Fertile Obsession: Validity After Poststructuralism.’ The Sociological Quarterly 34:4 (1993): 673–93.

Lake Texcoco is an emblematic geographical area located in the eastern vicinity of Mexico City. Since its inception as federal territory in 1971, it has become a place where violent transformations have occurred, causing it to break apart in fragments. As one approaches this lakebed and its political, social, and economic realms, its inherent brokenness impedes establishing a distinction between the ‘found’ and the ‘constructed’ (p. 675): in order to understand the ambiguous condition of such terrain, I have been compelled to act as discoverer, as producer of meaning, as one of the fragments inhabiting this lakebed. Validity is thus produced while being actively implicated in the context; it is also produced upon the creation of co-existence scenarios for this land’s radically diverse fragments, always refraining from one-sided reconstructions. As Lather points out while referring to a ‘rhizomatic’ kind of validity, the researcher becomes decentered while encountering a multi-centered reality (p. 680).

– Latour, Bruno. ‘Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene – a Personal View of What Is to Be Studied.’ Distinguished lecture at the American Association of Anthropologists, Washington, December 2014.

Lake Texcoco is neither an object of study, nor is it only a site: it is rather an ensemble of land, people, things, and power relations. Following Latour’s argument around the term ‘anthropocene’, material entities, such as Texcoco’s desiccated basin, may not be considered as discrete elements, but as systems of relations where humans are implicated with non-humans, ‘inanimate’ matter acquires agency, and hybrid realities are able to emerge.

– Muecke, Stephen. ‘The Fall: Fictocritical Writing.’ Parallax 8:4 (2002): 108–12.

The task of narrating this animist museum has led me to reconsider its validity in relation to storytelling, as a use of language allegedly contained in the sphere of literary fiction. As much as this museum is in a way an invention, Lake Texcoco is real: it is a physically present, highly contested space which, in the context of contemporary Mexico, needs to be critically addressed. The museum’s collection is also real, each of its objects playing as an argument that explicates the complexities of its particular context. In his essay, Muecke sheds some light on how a hybrid, boundary-deforming writing (or narration) he calls ‘fictocritical’ may emerge in an intermediate space between fiction and criticism, reinstating its own terms of validity: in such intermediate space, fiction may exist as a source for critical thinking, as much as criticism may become inventive and experimental.

– Salazar, Adriana. ‘All Things Living, All Things Dead: Lake Texcoco.’ Last modified 12 June, 2017. http://www.allthingslivingallthingsdead.com/.

Addressing Lake Texcoco’s contested context has implied producing new modes of validity that may allow for such inherent brokenness, as well as the researcher’s own affects, to be legible without attempting to subsume it all into a univocal whole. Lake Texcoco is a complex place, which has been radically transformed since its desiccation. This research project has undertaken the task of gathering evidence (both material and immaterial) from such transformation, understanding it in the light of contemporary Mexico’s political developments, as well as referencing the history of the age-old water body. This is why, for the research project here cited, I have constructed two ‘knowledge containers’ in an attempt to make room for ‘everything and all’. On one hand, the Encyclopedia of Living and Dead Things gathers ‘immaterial information’ regarding Lake Texcoco: data, field notes, descriptions, events, anecdotes, and historical accounts, among others, all coexisting within a certain textual structure. On the other hand, the Animist Museum of Lake Texcoco has been created as a container for ‘physical information’ regarding this lakebed: fragments of materials belonging to the abrupt transformations of the basin have been gathered, currently composing a collection of over 400 pieces.

– Taussig, Michael. ‘The Stories Things Tell and Why They Tell Them.’ e-flux Journal 36 (2012). Accessed 25 March, 2016. http: //www. e-flux.com/journal /36/61256/ the-stories-things-tell-and-why-they-tell-them/.

I have designed a narrated exhibition whose tour progresses from a condition of spatial darkness and indeterminacy to a state where its ‘animist’ terms of legibility are able to emerge: the Animist Museum’s pieces are allowed to manifest as ‘living things, as ‘bodies’, even as ‘equals’, rendering audible an otherwise non-representable assembly of human bodies and inanimate things. Storytelling, as Michael Taussig states in the final section of his article, may infuse language with a transformative power similar to that of shamanic conjuring, thus enabling the inanimate to come to life.

– Zhilyaev, Arseny. Introduction to Avant-Garde Museology, 21–56. Minneapolis: eflux, 2015.

In the introduction to Avant-Garde Museology, Zhilyaev presents a series of museological experiments and proposals emerging in early twentieth century post-revolutionary Russia. Such experimental museologies often intended to re-signify the museum as a place where political life, artistic experimentation, and research could thrive as intertwined realities. In resonance with the idea of museums being experiences rather than fixed spaces, ‘coming to life’ instead of becoming sites for art’s commoditization (pp. 44–45), the Animist Museum of Lake Texcoco, through the format of a narrated exhibition, aims at blurring the boundaries between the subject and the object, the viewer and the exhibition, the lakebed and the reflections it detonates.

Special thanks to Carlos Benavides for this audio tour’s sound design and mix.