In naming an exhibition after the Mexica pictograph denoting ‘place of,’ Ulrik López Medel (b. Mexico City, 1989) prefigures a site wherein something may perchance take place. What this primordial premise presents is not merely an area and its arrangement or a show and its sections, but rather, how an entity becomes simultaneous to its parts, and more truly, what other substances a body may welcome, allow to occupy its entrails, and eventually amount to. After all, and following its Latin source, the Spanish word for exhibition, exposición, insinuates this placement, or in this case, the place unstable and awaiting that which it can, in other respects, no longer and still be.

Upon entering Anahuacalli, the doorkeeper heralds the brittle material of place that has been introduced to the building’s otherwise flinty frame, by advising visitors to exercise caution around works in papier mâché. Yet across the cavern’s ground floor chambers, it is plastic crates which stack up, on and in which are displayed a sundry of things. Anthropomorphic vessels and the cardboard boxes in which they were first transported into the museum rest alongside a book from which López Medel’s fascination with paper draws. This last is a robust reference for paper fabrication traditions of the Aztec and Mayan, groups after whose architectural conceptions the museum was built under Diego Rivera’s vision. At this outset, the orange boxes’s industrial mien rises among the prehispanic clay objects that surround them, interveniently suspending art and artefact’s relentless antagonism. Where in one display shelf, López Medel humorously and seriously places vegetable and fruit inside a papier mâché bowl and casts fictitious the guises of a collection’s permanence. By replacing a centuries-old item with such, he converses with Rivera’s nationalist and modernist aspirations for the foundation of a temple housing excavated objects, at the same time that he makes an entrance into the museum’s crevices to ask how a work of art may appear inconspicuously in front of us or to betray the way by which a collection amasses and possesses shape. At this moment, he constitutes what else may be contained in, cradled by, or held in the indistinguishable corpora of collection, museum, and edifice.

Only on the following floor will yellow papier mâché appear, merrily inhabiting the solemn hall darkened by the museum’s volcanic rock. Namely, Espejo amarillo and Pie en el jardín’s work is that of insertion, where infixing wood into the museum’s gateways and wall cavities, they fill the architectural perdurability of Anahuacalli’s grid with doubt as they so insist to be, if only slightly or momentarily, be incorporated into the museum’s body. Placeholding is their language, just the same as that of Jardín anonimo which inundates a corner chamber with plant species sitting on plastic stools in papier mâché, lushly overwhelming hence the room’s austerity and stillness with green devices of rest, gathering, and growth.

Finally and again, the trace of placement appears in metal on the topmost level where the gesture is that of covering. Take for example Sol rojo and another embossed sheet, which sharing a room, lay over niche and ceiling, and in that, veil mural and sculpture with the slight and strong evocation of the color red, among pieces cut and galvanized to conjure the flatness of pre-contact paper dolls. Together, Ulrik López and curator Karla Niño de Rivera test to sense what may count as an exhibition piece, especially in the company of objects formidably cased in glass display and with whose metal frames they espouse a kind of relationship. Altogether, what may be suspended from a roof, hung on a wall, leaned against partitions, and laid on the ground are trialed by works which for the time being adhere to Anahuacalli’s organs. In other words, they hold place to the degree that their material, color, scale, and very position turn into their venue, that is, their own coming and becoming. Besides an exhibition site or a collection’s home, López Medel posits what else can be placed inside a museum, or more sensibly, of what else a museum can be a place of.