mexico city

The first time I interviewed Valgur it was in their Mexico City living room, surrounded by piles of broken synthesizers. It was 2019 and the band’s debut album Zapandú was gaining underground buzz for its unusual collage of electronic sounds and esoteric motifs, which included eerie vampire aesthetics and dreamy Zapotec poetry. But underneath their otherworldly creations, universally human questions of religion, family, and indigenous identity have always reigned supreme. During that initial chat, the sibling duo…

Design has operated this way in the world for a very long time. It still mostly does. While it is true, observes architect and designer Nicholas de Monchaux in his introduction to this issue, that design has accomplished much good in the world, “it has also shared responsibility for bringing us into our current ecological crisis; every new thing is perhaps not much better than the old thing.” Of course, we try to make new things that are better than what came before. But even big shifts are complicated. Take electric…

Weeks after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018, the combative leftist leader enraged international investors and Mexico’s business community by canceling the airport, which was already around one-third complete. During his campaign, López Obrador had railed against the project’s management for overspending and corruption. Then, in a post-election referendum launched by López Obrador’s party, the public had voted to scrap it (though critics claimed the results were unrepresentative, with just one in…