For too long, architecture has centered its gaze on the metropolis, neglecting and rendering invisible the landscapes and territories that make urban life possible. Yet cities are not isolated entities; they are the product of territorial and energetic reassemblies that transcend metropolitan boundaries, linking architecture to a web of diverse ecologies. Amid debates on energy, migration, and the environment, food often remains an afterthought—even though the way we produce, distribute, and consume it drives societies, shapes metropolises, and terraforms geographies more profoundly than any other energy source.

Through three interrelated research vectors, "Food Engines" examines Mexico's historical and contemporary relationship with food, speculating on the role of technology and politics in future agro-food systems, and exploring how architecture and culture contribute to their evolution. By focusing on the landscapes and architectures that feed the country, an intricate amalgam of artisanal and industrial processes is explored, where hyper-local production takes place amidst the standardization of the global market; as well as the maintenance of pre-Hispanic agro-architectures, through colonial territorial transformations and community tenure models that endure between official and self-regulated economies.

Therefore, this exhibition is not about food, but about a laboratory that brings together the systemic, political and ecological implications of the architectural substrate that makes its existence possible. Where, with each meal, palates are connected to a multitude of places that operate as remote engines: supermarkets and tianguis, greenhouses and milpas, farms and ejidos, warehouses and logistics networks, kitchens, canteens and trains, cold chains and stone silos, and even cities in landfills, which, together, form a distributed apparatus that allows the reassembly of the earth's crust into the building blocks of human life.