196,925 Meters: Mapping the Border of Mexico City

by Laura Janka Zires (MAUD ’11) and Victor Muñoz Sanz (MAUD ’11)

196,925 Meters: Mapping the Border of Mexico City as an Event in the Physical and Virtual Landscape is the systematic documentation by a two-sided geo-tagged panorama of the diverse conditions on the edge of Mexico City’s political boundary through walking along it. It would be both a performance and a statement: a performance since the act of us as individuals in a particular Landscape condition in a particular time would constitute a fundamental part of the work and its result, where time, space, our bodies and the relationship between them and the moving flows are the basic elements; a statement for it aims to be a call for a regional thinking in Mexico City and neighboring areas, which must acknowledge the necessity of understanding transversal landscape and infrastructural systems independently of political boundaries. While social phenomena, ecological systems and infrastructure should work organically thus respond to social and environmental natural dynamics, the geographic line that defines what is in and what is out, leaves in its place a field if not of battle, of great conflict.

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The borderline can no longer be seen as merely a line, but as a place of exchange. This new transversal panorama urges a shift of representation; from plan view, to section; from lineal to perpendicular. It is in this sense that an in-situ and close approach to the “site” will make its understanding possible. The systematic documentation of the political border of Mexico City as a continuous yet changing landscape through photography should allow mapping the space of exchange in great detail, and thinking about the meaning and potential of the border as a system.