A Fountain (Diffrent Dissents)
2024
Sound installation
Aluminum, speaker wire, metal chains, 16-channel sound interface (sound, looped, 24 mins.)
Commissioned work by Salón Acme.
A Fountain (Different Dissents) is a site-specific installation that suggests a dialogue between its form, its sound, and the space it inhabits. This large-format work, for which I was commissioned by the renowned Mexico City-based art platform Salón Acme, responds to the complex layers of history beneath a building that, at the beginning of the 20th century, embodied the anxiety for modernization characteristic of “El Porfiriato” (1876-1911). In this context, the fountains located in central courtyards were status symbols, where control over a constant w also represented colonial interests in externalizing the so-called nature to dominate it.
A Fountain (Different Dissents) is conceived both as a dissident fountain and a metaphorical waterfall. Through a 16-channel sound interface hanging from the heights of the central patio, this installation reproduces a composition made from a variety of sounds produced by the waters of the Colorado River (Mexico and the USA). This river originates in Colorado, with its waters flowing through five different states in the US before finally reaching its delta on the Mexican side of the border. Using field recordings taken at different points along the water collection and consumption networks from this river (dams, irrigation and drainage canals, intakes, sprinklers, pumping stations, automated irrigation systems, wells, and pipes), A Fountain (different Dissents) seeks to open a space for reflection to consider the environmental, geopolitical, and historical implications of a body of water in crisis, existing as a geopolitical (dis)connection between Mexico and the United States.