Las huellas del agua (Watermarks): Building a Transmedia Spatial Archive of Flooding in Mexico City

Date
-
Event Sponsor
Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Anthropology
Location
Building 50, 51A
Las huellas del agua (Watermarks): Building a Transmedia Spatial Archive of Flooding in Mexico City

LATIN AMERICAN WORKING GROUP EVENT: 

Please RSVP for next Thursday's discussion session with Dean Chahim, Dissertation Writer, Department of Anthropology. He will workshop his piece, "Las huellas del agua (Watermarks): Building a Transmedia Spatial Archive of Flooding in Mexico City." 

Abstract: 

Deep below Mexico City lies an entire underground world of drainage tunnels, which allow the city to prevent large-scale flooding downtown by sacrificing instead the poor periphery through mundane, routine, and ephemeral floods. These infrastructures weave together stories of suffering from floods on one end of the city to those on another, yet few know they even exist – let alone how they function. This project, produced in collaboration with Mexican artists and cartographers, attempts to denaturalize and make visible the unequal social toll of flooding through the creation of a web-based transmedia “spatial archive.” Through mapping, images, film, audio, and text, this project follows the material and emotional traces (huellas) of the drainage system that surface, at times in unexpected and banal forms, in the lives and memories of residents and urban landscapes. It shows how the system connects communities across the sprawling metropolis, tying them to a failed – and deeply unequal – hydraulic paradigm. In this presentation of a work-in-progress, Dean will show a few of the short films produced for the archive, the site architecture which links stories through maps, and discuss the production process, theoretical and local context, and community engagement goals

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