symbolic layering (work in progress 2009-)
Urban growth is an issue that has become a common trade in contemporary cities. As citizens we sometimes stand aside and watch as progress or modernization unfolds in front of us. But what is behind the conformation of the city? What is it that makes it grow to points where chaos devours social cohesion, or where law becomes only a memory? In Latin America, and more specifically in México, we can phrase this situation as a pharaonic edifice where, as Ana Elena Mallet mentions in here text México City: From Constant Crisis to Failed Modernity, every six years, a new government in power presents delirious modernization projects that are bestowed to the coming generations; a sensationalistic gesture by which it tries to immortalize evidence of its desperate (and failed) attempt to overcome the irrevocable state of inertia.
And so, the contemporary Latin American city seems to be nothing more than a dissimilar group of symbolic layers where many physical infrastructures stand more as a sign of corruption, bad taste, the inability to plan but mostly as gestures of the lack of power citizens have in the construction of their habitable spaces.
Finally these images are reminders of how as citizens we have been transformed, for we are subconsciously and consequently the city in which we live in.