Water Under the Bridge / Agua pasada (ongoing) investigates Mexico City’s infrastructure, particularly its bridges, as an environmental fixture that impacts the collective subconscious.
Mexico City’s bridges determine our transportation time, the unity (or disruption) of our neighborhoods, and our safety (or danger) while traveling. It is so part of the urban landscape that we barely notice it. Until it breaks.
I started taking pictures of the Cuemanco bridge in the summer of 2021, while it was still under construction. It seemed such a barbaric structure, particularly then, the community fresh with fear after their metro line collapsed. Since then, I have photographed the bridge using two methods.
First, I made images using prisms in order to bring something “out of sight” or “underneath the bridge” into the photograph. I was aiming to advance two ideas: one, the idea that a bridge represents the bypassing of something else (traffic, a community, a body of water). And two, that this “something else” does not disappear with the construction of infrastructure. It persists.
Not only did this bridge destroy part of the city's limited wetlands, but the construction required the active deviation of water from the work site. So, I wanted to let the water seep into the final product. To achieve this effect, I soaked my rolls of film in water from under the bridge.
