Mariana Yampolsky: Home & Sustenance in Rural Mexico
Landscape and architecture, always embedded within Indigenous worlds, stood at the center of Mariana Yampolsky’s photographic practice. Her seminal book La casa que canta: arquitectura popular mexicana, first published in 1982 and reissued in 2024, continues to serve as a key reference for understanding Mexico’s vernacular architecture from both ethnographic and architectural perspectives.
Marking the centenary of Yampolsky’s birth, Mónica del Arenal brings renewed attention to the photographer’s work while exploring the enduring relationships between house, kitchen, and milpa —a Mesoamerican intercropping system to cultivate maize, beans, and native squash. Together, these landscapes and practices embody a vernacular heritage that reflects both practical ingenuity and the social values of Indigenous ways of dwelling. The exhibition also traces the origins of native-language terminology and examines techniques, structures, and artifacts that intertwine architecture and agriculture across Mexico’s rural sphere.
The research “The Milpa, the Cuexcomate, and the Tecorral: Home and Sustenance in Rural Mexico Through the Images of Mariana Yampolsky,” was presented in 2025 at the V International Conference Cultura y Ciudad. Food and Architecture: Home, Street, Territory, Higher Technical School of Architecture, University of Granada, Spain. All images come from the © Mariana Yampolsky Photographic Archive, preserved at the Francisco Xavier Clavigero Library, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.
About the curator
Monica del Arenal is a PhD candidate in Architectural History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on twentieth-century modern architecture and architectural landscapes in Mexico. She has curated architectural exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Mexico, and the United States, and is currently developing the project Modern Domestic Landscapes: Women’s Crossed Paths between Latin America and Europe for the 2026 Barcelona World Capital of Architecture.
She is the recipient of the 2026 Edilia and François-Auguste de Montêquin Junior Scholar Fellowship from the Society of Architectural Historians, which supports her archival and site-based research on Luis Barragán’s Jardines del Bosque project in Guadalajara, Mexico.
