This book is the culmination of a project by artist Eduardo Abaroa that began in 2012 as an art exhibition in Kurimanzutto gallery, Mexico City, and gradually increased in scope to include photography, drawing, group discussions, archives, essays, guided tours, and public presentations.

Abaroa’s hypothetical proposal is simple: to destroy the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Advised by demolition experts, this controlled destruction would include the building’s architecture and all its contents: pre-Hispanic and ethnographic collections, auditorium, library, gift shop, warehouses, buildings, and school.

Conceived in the early 1960s by Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos, Secretary of Education Jaime Torres Bodet, and architect Pedro Ramírez Vazquez (among many others) as a complex didactic tool, the National Museum of Anthropology was intended to house the archaeological treasures of pre-Hispanic Mexico and to celebrate indigenous cultures. At the same time, the museum's collection was populated with artifacts that the government often stole from these same communities, and continue to marginalize under the premise that "We are all Mexico."

The imagined destruction of this building is an absurdity that only appears less so when compared to the ongoing and very real destruction of the environmental and living conditions of those indigenous communities it purportedly celebrates.

With texts by Mariana Botey, Abraham Cruzvillegas, James Oles, Francisco Reyes Palma, Sandra Rozental, and Daniel Garza Usabiaga.