1985 Earthquake

Archaeology

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On the report written by Parsons and Morett about their archaeological expeditions in Lake Texcoco during the 1980s and 90s, there is a mention of a landfill site made from debris from the Federal District. Such debris lay beside the road recently opened by the National Water Commission (Conagua). Among the rubble, there were archaeological tepalcates (ancient Mexican ceramic objects), carved stones, and other objects belonging to the ancient indigenous communities, mixed up with modern urban materials. Archaeologists tell how part of their fieldwork took place within such rubble accumulations, learning to distinguish the more valuable materials from the more recent. They found millenary pieces mixed with today’s objects; in this mix, the mundane collided with the archaeologically valuable.  [...]

Levelling

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At the outset of construction on an uneven terrain—with basins, elevations, or mere slopes—it is necessary to carry out a process of ground levelling. This often implies bringing in outside materials, shredded into pieces small enough to successfully cover the gaps. After a decree was issued in 1971 for the institution of Lake Texcoco’s Federal Enclosure, hundreds of hectares covering the muddy bottom of the ancient lake were cleared and left idle, prompting all kinds of infrastructural, real estate, and touristic projects: the dusty Conagua (National Water Commission) archives shelter the copies of typewritten development projects for Lake Texcoco, proposed soon after the new territory was instituted. Once the lake was desiccated, the patch of land represented on sheets of paper was rumpled, and flattened again. Correspondingly, the land needed levelling, even if not assigned to any concrete project. The sheer openness of idle land incites its occupants to tame and homogenize it, rendering it available: pure possibility, pure future.    [...]   

Mud

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An earthquake is in a way a dance between two tectonic plates. One moves towards the other and the latter retracts, animated by the impulse of the opposing plate. One tucks itself under or beside the other, and while they settle, they send energy upward, animating everything they sustain, shaking the land in tremors, in sways. For thousands of years, the Cocos and North American Plates have coexisted under the Valley of Mexico, in the tension preceding the dance. Every so often, they stoke each other, moving subtly, thus slowly changing the setup of the board sitting on the Earth’s surface: volcanoes, valleys, rivers, lakes, mountains, and, more recently, a city that stands like a cardboard scale model, wobbling between two uneven tables. This human-scale model sinks at its very center with the weight of concrete and rock, as it sits on the bottom of a desiccated lake: a floor made of mud, algae, water, salt, and microorganisms sedimented for millennia.  [...]

Museum

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There is a collection of carefully selected materials, gathered in different spots of ancient Lake Texcoco. Among ruins of multiple government projects, abandoned during the last forty years in the lake lands, there are all kinds of objects: heaps of rubble, building foundations, scattered ruins of crumbled houses, dry wells full with trash, broken fences of an empty stable, rusty tools, fallen pillars, unreadable signs, objects hidden in the grass, documents with the corners torn and stained by the sun.

These and other materials were located in a series of excavations during which salt and dirt were removed from their surfaces. Gradually, the surfaces became recognizable in their differences. From their initial aspect of solid rubble chunks, a wide spectrum of consistencies and textures emerged. Some ancient materials that belonged to the bed of the disappeared lake were found, together with certain wall-like structures built in successive attempts at recovering the basin.  [...]

Ruin

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I am not a thing, but a state of all things built. I am the inevitable fate of everything which is altered by human hands, the fall of everything that rises. Human excitement about the future—that optimistic impulse to create lasting things, to change the world, so that the footprint of a single species lasts on Earth—makes me sad and pitiful. Although I appear before their eyes in the subtlest to the most catastrophic ways, humans prefer not to see me. Or, if they do, they forget me hastily. So many cities have fallen, leaving pieces of me on the ground. I appear so often in the form of destroyed buildings, of shipwrecks buried in the bottom of the sea... For centuries I have been present in everything and in all human stories.  [...]