After confirming the strength of the surrounding cityscape a 5.5 ton excavator rolled through the street and stuffed the void in with fill dirt. Within two weeks the intersection looked like nothing had happened. In Mexico City, between the years of 2017 and 2019, more than 550 sinkholes were recorded throughout the city. If these glitches were kept open long enough to accumulate, the city would look as though it was riddled with holes.
Tracing Landscape Dismemberment Through Time
Cross Sections of Mexico City 1300-2023
Water soluble graphite and watercolor on archival paper
2024
Cross Sections of Mexico City 1300–2023 centers on a specific sinkhole event in Mexico City as a point of rupture revealing the city’s buried rivers and desiccated lagoon. The counter-mapping, a series of hand-drawn and painted cross-sectionals, chronicles the landscape’s transformation from the pre-colonial era of the floating city of Tenochtitlán to the present day. By visualizing the changes over time, the cross sections reveal the chronic slow violence enacted by the city’s drainage infrastructure. This mapping also makes it possible to hold in view the point of rupture and the centuries of violence against the landscape within the same frame.
- Utilized QGIS to define sightlines and contemporary elevation data.
- Layers of historical data—including colonial maps, archival government documents, and aerial photographs—were traced onto the sections, creating a visual palimpsest of the land.
- The aligned cross sections allow the viewer to trace the development of the draining apparatuses over hundreds of years, making the invisible, centuries-long process of slow violence visible in a single frame.