In Pre-Hispanic cultures, as well as in the many forms of Mexican culture that followed, the natural world has often been understood as a living and powerful presence. Earth, water, air and fire are sources of life but also forces capable of overwhelming it. Creation and destruction are not opposites but part of the same elemental cycle. These ancient understandings continue to resonate within the Mexican imagination, where the landscape can feel at once familiar, sacred and yet profoundly unknowable.

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Perhaps nowhere is this tension more visible than in the volcanoes that rise above the Mexican landscape. Often, they appear timeless, majestic, almost eternal: immense bodies of stone that seem to belong to the world before memory. Yet beneath their apparent stillness lies the possibility of sudden transformation. A volcano can sleep for generations and then awaken, reminding us that the ground beneath our feet is never as stable as we imagine. It becomes a potent symbol of the forces that shape our world — forces that sustain, threaten and ultimately exceed human control.

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A Natural History of Violence brings these ideas of nature, survival, destruction and renewal together. Featuring the artwork of Chantal Meza, the internationally acclaimed abstract painter born in Puebla, the exhibition moves between the past, the present and imagined futures. Her work opens a space in which the natural and the human become difficult to separate, where landscapes become psychological terrains and violence becomes not only an act of destruction, but a force of transformation.

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The exhibition asks a series of questions that remain unresolved: 

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What are the myths that shape our understanding of the world? Does the earth witness our pain and suffering? How does life disappear, and what remains afterwards? Can the earth itself become a weapon? How do the elements — earth, water, air and fire — continue to speak to us of violence, memory and imagination? How do we picture extraction, depletion and the scars left upon the living world? And, as we attempt to imagine different futures, must we return to something older and more primal — something buried beneath the narratives of progress?

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At its heart, however, this is not simply a story about violence. It is a story about what it means to be human in this world: about adaptation, transformation and the enduring possibility of renewal. Destruction can mark an ending, but it can also create the conditions for something new to emerge.

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By bringing the story of humans and nature together, A Natural History of Violence asks us to look again at the world we have inherited — not as something separate from ourselves, but as something of which we are profoundly and irrevocably part of. The exhibition invites us to consider our origins, our capacity for destruction and the fragile systems that sustain us. Above all, it asks whether, within the cycles of the elemental world, we might still find the imagination to envision another future: one in which our relationship to nature becomes not merely survival, but a form of reawakening.