These human-induced sinkholes emerge as symptoms of landscapes in distress. It is hard to grasp slow violence committed against landscape assemblages—the piecemeal dissolving of healthy entanglements over centuries. The artificial and prolonged separation of water from the soil results in dismembered landscapes with continually altered states of interaction between animate and inanimate elements of the ecosystem—including the substrate, botanical life, nonhuman and human beings.
Where is the water?
Using critical and counter cartography practices, I attempted to push a pin through the palimpsest layers of landscape memory at two case study sites—a sinkhole that opened on the edge of historic Mexico City in 2017, and a sinkhole that opened along the I-10 Expressway running through New Orleans in 2022.
I define landscape dismemberment as the forced and sustained separation of key elements of landscape assemblages. The artificial cleavage of water from substrate breaks down the stability of a healthy web of living relationships.
While doing site visits, I occupied the locations as a snag caught on the forgettings of past realities. In laying a wreath at the sinkhole sites, I acknowledged the death of the vibrant landscape assemblages that once existed. And, counter-mapping the contemporary sites using botanical cuttings and historical plant migration information I situate the resettled landscape assemblages within the strangeness emerging in the wake of capitalist disruptions.
Rather than being understood as an outcry from the assemblage, sinkholes are treated as threats to the most valuable alienated asset—the land—because sinkholes challenge the infrastructure which secures the apparatuses of dismemberment and, in some cases, mean the evaporation of the asset all together.
In the following counter-cartographic maps I trace the construction and implementation of apparatuses of dismemberment over time. To complete these mappings, I dug through centuries of colonial maps, government documents, sewerage and water infrastructure maps, aerial photographs, and footage from news coverage while asking the question, “Where is the water?”
This work was exhibited at the University of Texas at Dallas in March 2024. Special thanks to Katherine Gunning for photographing the work and event.
