Cantera Oriente by Bosque Vacío

"a scuttling micro world of submerged beasties" -THE WIRE

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"...La Cantera Oriente is an inadvertent testament to the city's lacustrine history. Its line of Ahuehuete trees, rooted along the water's edge, evokes memories of a time when water dominated. Springs continually flow, reclaiming a site once exploited for basalt extraction used in paving the city's streets. The voracious excavation inadvertently unleashed this gushing presence, a reminder of the water that demands acknowledgment." -- María Antonia González Valerio, curator, “Spaces of Resistance: An Incomplete Catalogue of Nature on the Urban Fringes,” .

Cantera Oriente swims in ambiguities and hybridities. The album is composed from field recordings taken over 18 months of field work in an ecological reserve in the southern part of Mexico City, with its 21 million inhabitants. Like the megapolis of Mexico City itself, Cantera Oriente is a site of contradictions, ad hoc amalgams and unlikely syntheses. It was once a quarry, then a series of water filled lagoons, and now, after soil was brought in to fill some of these waterways, it exists as a reserve, an open lab for the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a series of football training fields.

In this work nature and culture blur, as Leena Lee and Guillermo Guevara make audible the intricate interactions between asphalt, basaltic rocks, piped water, housing, earthquakes which are entangled with Mexico City's particular histories and contemporary realities.

If space is, as the geographer Doreen Massey suggests, a "simultaneity of stories so far", then Cantera Oriente has a plethora of tales to recount. Over the five pieces which comprise this album, Bosque Vacío (Lee and Guevara) encourage us to consider just some of these in compositions which create room for the complexities of place to unfold, and the reverberative legacies of mining and extraction to be heard.

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Cantera Oriente was developed as a live act for the exhibition “Spaces of Resistance: An Incomplete Catalogue of Nature on the Urban Fringes. Produced by Arte+Ciencia and Bios ex Machina and exhibited in 2023 at the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico. This exhibition focused on manifestations of nature in urban enclaves, and attempted a critical examination histories of urbanisation in Mexico City.

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