La Jornada: Photographer appeals to the visual memory of the Valley of Mexico

Mexico City, in its vertical expansion, has covered and limited the city dweller’s view of the natural landscape of the Valley of Mexico basin. The photographer Santiago Arau (CDMX, 1980) recovers this lost visibility through the 40 aerial digital impressions that make up Heritage: Water and fireexhibition mounted at the University Museum of Sciences and Art (MUCA), within the framework of the 700 years of the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.

“Cities grow upwards and that same verticality sinks us a little. One of my dreams has to do with how to change this landscape. What an aerial photographer does is go to the rooftop. So, why not think about building another layer from above, from where perhaps the environment can be recovered again,” he told The Day the artist during the official presentation of the exhibition.

Unlike Arau’s exhibition three years ago at the National Museum of Architecture, at the MUCA you can only see the heritage that has to do with water and fire. The speaker likes to quote Octavio Paz, who wrote: “Mexico was born from the union of fire and water. It lives by those elements and because of them, several times, it has been on the verge of perishing.”

The exhibition recovers “a personal vision of a territory that I have always inhabited. Suddenly there is that surprise of finding common places that take you to other places. The ideas we had about the territory change, then, when flying a drone you begin to see a different perspective. Gerardo Murillo already said it Dr. Atl when he got on airplanes and painted from above. The use of drones makes the technique look a little more specific and punctual by being able to control the painting.”

Upon beginning his investigation, Arau was surprised to learn that the mountains he saw were volcanoes. “Cerro de la Estrella is a volcano; the mountain range that we always see in the background in Ixtapalalpa and Tláhuac, also Ajusco and Xitle.” In parallel, the exhibitor made the discovery of what was lost. “By that I mean water, which is not found now”

Understand our territory

The exhibition includes a reproduction of a map of the Valley of Mexico in 1519, prepared by Miguel Covarrubias in 1939. In it you can see the lakes of Texcoco, Xochimilco, Chalco, Zumpango, standing to perhaps, all together, think about a solution to problems like floods.”

More than recovering the original landscape of the Valley of Mexico, the idea is to recognize it and reconnect with that because “the mountains were always there. It is interesting how they were lost. The urban sprawl erased them from the landscape, to have a scale that we now see between walls because we cannot see them directly. For example, the mountains then we do not know where they are.” Arau is now developing a project to photograph each of the mountains and volcanoes and make an orographic atlas.

The first axis of the exhibition revolves around the lake system and its valleys: México, Cuautitlán, Tizayuca and Apan. The second “makes us look up at the elevations that, in turn, contain craters or topographic depressions to place us between the Sierra de Guadalupe and Tepotzotlán, in the north; the Sierra Nevada, to the east; the Sierra de Santa Catarina and Chichinautizin, to the south, and the Sierra de las Cruces in the west,” said Mónica Cejuda Collera, director of the UNAM Faculty of Architecture.

Heritage: Water and fireby Santiago Arau, will remain until June 27 at the University Museum of Sciences and Art (University Interior Circuit, Coyoacán, Ciudad Universitaria). Admission is free.