Chinampa Veneta: A Scenography of Extractivism at the Venice Biennale
In the run-up to the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, the Mexican National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL) has announced the Mexican pavilion, "Chinampa Veneta."
Chinampas are multilayered and multispecies systems of farmable mudflats built over centuries through the kinships between indigenous mineral, more-than-human, and human communities in the shallow lakes of the Anahuac Valley in what is today Mexico City, specifically in the southern boroughs of Tláhuac and Xochimilco (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Chinampero moving between chinampas by canoe, San Gregorio Atlapulco, 2023. Photograph by Elis Mendoza.
The official statement on the Mexican pavilion celebrates the piece as a "symbiotic" bridge between Venice and the Xochimilco Lake Basin, and deploys it as a device for an ecologically regenerated future. This seemingly innocuous rhetoric works to conceal a problem that permeates the project from beginning to end: the Mexican pavilion for the Biennale is a device of symbolic, epistemological, and socio-environmental extraction. It appropriates the chinampa system as a museum fetish, strips it of the human and more-than-human networks that sustain it, and by isolating this fragment of chinampa in the foreign waters of the Venetian lagoon consolidates new forms of violence against the territories it purports to represent.
According to INBAL bulletin 443, the pavilion is presented as a three-part work: an exhibition module in the Arsenale that “represents a system of chinampas in different stages of growth;” a “living chinampa” planted with a fusion of the Mesoamerican milpa and the Venetian vite maritata; and an iconic piece: a floating island titled “Chinampa del Mondo,” anchored in the lagoon as a nod to architect Aldo Rossi's Teatro del Mondo. Official rhetoric insists on symbiosis: two lakeside cities united in a gesture where “the chinampas invite us to look to the past”—not to the endangered chinamperx present—and invite “us to imagine design processes that reintegrate life cycles, so that the built environment is no longer in opposition to nature.”
Among these invitations are also very specific political destinies in the images released by the curatorial team, where we can detect the mechanisms of extraction that articulate the proposal. If ecological collapse could be resolved through renderings, we could print the entire Xochimilco lagoon in the most Borgesian resolution and send it by courier to the United Nations: it would cost less and—judging by the institutional enthusiasm—would “regenerate” just as much.
In the lead rendering of “Chinampa Veneta,” a single—and quite lonely—attempt at a chinampa can be seen floating on a horizon of generic water; there are no canal networks, no communality with other chinampa labors, no chinamperxs who historically co-produce the chinampería, no homes, no families, no festivals or chores, much less the extremely serious difficulties the chinampa farmers endure as they resist several regimes of violence in order to keep their environment alive. Moreover, the image shows the chinampa islet being dragged by two industrial vessels, a tugboat and a motorboat—both polluting, noisy, disruptive, and harmful means of water transport for the chinampas.
Aldo Rossi defined the Teatro del Mondo as an architecture "capable of adapting itself to the city," a machine that reflected distinct aspects of Venetian architectural typologies.[1] Like this theater, the chinampa is traditionally composed of physical, historical, and cultural traces of its immediacy; the chinampa also has an adaptive capacity because it is born from its surroundings. This is where the similarities between the Teatro del Mondo and the chinampa end. Historian Manfredo Tafuri argued along these same lines that the theater was born to float and be deciphered in its encounters. Conversely, the chinampa takes root, anchors itself, and remains situated. Indeed, those who call chinampas "floating gardens" are tragically mistaken: the chinampa doesn't float at all: it is existentially rooted in the wetland (Figure 2).
Figure 2. A chinampero prepares the chapines to receive the seeds, San Gregorio Atlapulco, 2023. Photograph by Daniel P. Gamez.
"Chinampa Veneto" as a floating fetish is testimony to how power (in this case, the Mexican state represented in the proposal selected by INBAL) strips the chinampa of its meanings and empties it until it's reduced to a signifier at the curators’ disposal. The chinampa of Xochimilco, unlike its Venetian simulation, is a complex system deeply rooted in the specificity of the micro-basins of the southernmost part of the Anáhuac. "Chinampa Veneto" insists on rewriting it as an autonomous object, aestheticized as a stage set and—above all—as available as a Lego piece. Its "function," the institutional text states, "is to capture carbon, purify water, and deliver nutrients." But to and for whom? No chinampa hands appear in the presentation material, no traditional boats travel its canals to transport vegetables, mud, fish, or family, no migratory or native birds rest in the absent ancient trees, and no axolotl or teporingo appear on its banks. Ecological efficiency is isolated as an exportable patent while the subjects who uphold it in the Anáhuac Basin are erased from the frame. Not even this fiction holds up as an ecological proposal: the rendering shows a pile-up of vegetation that makes no sense in the reality of the chinampa; magueys and prickly pears are thrown in with tomatoes and corn in a bricolage that confirms the willingness to use the chinampa to deposit other meanings, other functions.
At the Arsenale, the curatorial team further dissects the chinampa. A museographic device displays the chapín as the first phase in the “creation” of the chinampa by deconstructing it into its elements: plants germinating in trays, packaged soil profiles, seeds, arranged as samples ready for the showcase. The scene refers less to Xochimilco than to the nineteenth-century taxonomic compulsion to classify, name, and prepare the fruits of its colonial campaign for extraction, and in this exercise, strips Indigenous nations of their knowledge systems. The chapín's effectiveness resides in the series of biochemical, social, and more-than-human relations that comprise it; to present it as merely a singular piece is to denude it of its reason for being (Figure 3). When brought to the global theater of art biennials, this impulse gives way to its sister practice, colonial taxidermy—an operation of epistemological extraction.
Figure 3. Benito, a chinampero’s cat, plays between kale growing on a chinampa, San Gregorio Atlapulco, 2024. Photograph by Sergio Beltrán-García.
Colonial taxidermy separates the entity from its biome and exhibits it as an exotic curiosity before the foreign gaze, a gesture that tells us more about the power that transformed it into meaning machines than it tells us of the actual objects. This operation embodies Edward Said’s Orientalism, producing alterities digestible for the Western imagination and consumption. Thus, the culture, engineering, and technology of the Indigenous peoples of the Anáhuac Basin are transformed into natural and primitive objects, heritages of humanity, and formulas for climate change without visible authors. It disembodies the chinampa practice, denying any real space or representation to the people who sustain it. The flesh-and-blood chinampa person doesn't exist here because they don't matter to this gaze.
Who carried out this neocolonial extractive operation? The official portrait of the pavilion's creative team shows seventeen proud individuals standing amid vegetation and next to a palm-thatched roof, carefully framed for the photograph. The portrait was most likely taken on the controversial chinampas of Arca Tierra (present in the team portrait): a private company that has taken advantage of the socio-environmental and historical deterioration that the Mexican state has wreaked on the Chinampería to promote high-end gastronomic tourism in the chinampas they manage.
To understand this problem, it is crucial to remember that the November 1991 reform to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari opened the communal lands of the Chinampas to the private market. The commodification of communal lands deepened and accelerated their colonization through urbanization, pollution, and the dismantling of socio-environmental structures that have gradually forced Indigenous chinampa families to sell their lands because it is increasingly difficult for them to sustain themselves through farming in the neoliberal market where they also resist dispossession and criminalization. Who would have thought that food sovereignty was a matter of international logistics: we plant in Mexico, we photograph in Venice, and hunger—like a good host—stays home tending the land.
Despite the diverse range of interesting professional backgrounds that the “Chinampa Veneta” team could bring together, the absence of faces marked by the lacustrine agricultural journey, of those who are familiar with these stories, memories, and struggles is striking. Also conspicuous is the absence of the clothing and tools that typically accompany the work in Xochimilco, which endures amid saltpeter, blows from police batons, methane emissions, water plunder, and criminal charges for defending the land. That is why the staging of the photo raises suspicion: without the presence of the chinampa farmers who actually work on the land, the chinampa "travels" as a concept, not as a social practice rooted in the bodies, sweat, and chinamperx legacies.
“The Mexican pavilion for the Biennale … appropriates the chinampa system as a museum fetish, strips it of the human and more-than-human networks that sustain it.”
This dissociation has serious political consequences. Converted into a mythical installation, the chinampa is exhibited as a replicable, and therefore marketable, technology without the historical density that links it to the peoples of the Anáhuac Basin. By eliminating the socio-environmental relationships of the chinampa, the pavilion enables its appropriation by future markets of “nature-based solutions.” This is a rather crude—one might even say lazy—greenwashing: the adjective “regenerative” legitimizes the extraction of knowledge and raw materials while native wetlands collapse under real estate siege, sewage pollution, and the touristic development that buries wetlands under concrete.
Mixe linguist Yasnaya Elena Aguilar speaks of a “folkloric mirror” where the Mexican state and its representations (like this one) neutralize collective agency to convert it into a heritage commodity. “Chinampa Veneta” compulsively repeats this gesture when it displaces and supplants the chinampa people. This compulsion obeys the developmentalist imaginary, which Wolfgang Sachs criticized when he observed how the extraction of knowledge from Indigenous peoples in Latin America—presented as universally transferable “green technologies”—catalyzes development and progress that, far from reversing socio-environmental collapse, deepens the subordination of Indigenous peoples to new international financial valuation chains. As Silvia Federici has warned us, this privatization of the commons also accumulates, through dispossession, a new symbolic enclosure that prepares the chinampa landscape for further legal, material, and military enclosures.
We refuse to allow this fictitious landscape to be presented as the only true future of Xochimilco. That is, to export, as an image, its last chinampa, so that finally freed from the burden of their own wetland, the Xochimilca peoples will be able to dedicate themselves to the selfie tourism of chinampas without distraction.
According to recent documentation by community organizations, Xochimilco loses hectares of chinampa land every year, transformed into subdivisions, vehicle bridges, or gravel dumps. The emergency lies not in exporting milpas—the symbiotic relationship between corn, beans, squash, and quelites, or edible weeds— to Venice, but in guaranteeing clean water, soil free from rubble and chemical contamination, and political autonomy for those who still farm within the basin. By shifting the problem to Europe, "Chinampa Veneta" distracts attention from concrete territorial conflicts and reinforces the narrative that simply representing ecology is enough to repair it.
The analogy with the Teatro del Mondo is symptomatic. The curatorial team argues that Rossi conceived the structure as a “hinge between the constructed and the imaginary.” Its power was ephemeral, almost carnivalesque. That the "Mexican team" revisits that precedent confirms the desire to transform a living system into a stage set: a stage that, after applause, can be dismantled without consequence. But real chinampas aren't removable: they depend on the flow of the wetland, the succession of mudflats, the planting and collective care of the tasks, and the social strength these interactions produce. By denying this complexity, the pavilion perpetuates a kind of socio-ecocide: the simultaneous destruction of ecological fabrics and the communities that sustain them.
“The pavilion could come even closer to achieving its regenerative intentions … recognizing the times, forms of organization, and knowledge of the chinampa people, as well as the impossibility of reproducing the chinampa without them.”
At this point, it's worth asking: what would constitute a gesture that counters this extractivism? First and foremost, it's urgent to recognize that the defense of Xochimilco is currently in the hands of chinampa farmers committed to the struggle and defense of the territory—but also teachers, children, involved residents, cooks, artists, among many others—organized in neighborhood collectives that pull together to litigate, cultivate, harvest, and conduct community education and communication, despite suffering from smear campaigns that criminalize their efforts, and repression exercised by local authorities.
The assemblies of traditional authorities from Indigenous communities and neighborhoods—of which there are many, such as the Casa del Pueblo Tlamachtiloyan community space in Atlapulco—work daily, combining community education with tasks such as documenting canal pollution, collectively remembering struggles and traditions, promoting seed farms, and organizing canal-cleaning faenas. These processes don't need to travel to Venice to prove their worth. Instead, they require our respect, support, and protection; they require resources, visibility, and autonomy.
For now, the only guaranteed harvest that INBAL will reap at the Venice Biennale is the prestige sought by its curatorial committee and those who created this pavilion—a select crop that, paradoxically, flourishes the further it is from the real Xochimilcan mud and those who stir it up.
The pavilion, however, could come even closer to achieving its regenerative intentions if it shifted its focus from the fetishistic, object-based spectacular to political co-authorship. This would entail, at the very least, recognizing the times, forms of organization, and knowledge of the chinampa people, as well as the impossibility of reproducing the chinampa without them; and redirecting the budget (which are public resources) and political spokespersons to the assemblies that defend the territory. Until this happens, "Chinampa Veneta" will continue to embody the logic it denounces, extracting value from the people to capitalize on it in Europe.
The chinampa, far from being a folkloric reliquary, is a living organism of reciprocity between humans, fungi, stones, plants, animals, mud, lichens, and water (Figure 4). By isolating it as a floating artifact, the Mexican pavilion reproduces the same colonial gesture that drained the lakes of Anáhuac, begun by the Spanish colonizers, and continued by the current governments operating in the Basin, thereby declaring a living territory vacant in order to reinvent it at will. Calling this gesture "regenerative" only deepens the colonial wound and makes the Chinampa further vulnerable to financial speculation.
Figure 4. A chinampa with rows of thriving different crops, San Gregorio Atlapulco, 2023. Photograph by Sergio Beltrán-García.
In light of this, we invite readers to follow, read, learn from, approach, and support on social media the assemblies, collectives, and organizations that emerge from those who for generations have cared for and inhabited the Chinampas and sustained it day after day; and not those who administer them and live far away. When deciding where we focus our attention—and funding—we can opt between extractivist scenery or the autonomy of Indigenous peoples.
Citation
Sergio Beltrán-García, Elis Mendoza, Daniel P. Gámez, “Chinampa Veneta: A Scenography of Extractivism at the Venice Biennale,” PLATFORM, May 12, 2025.
Notes
[1] Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford, eds. Aldo Rossi: Buildings and Projects (Rizzoli, 1986), 10.
