Possessing Nature / Mexican Pavilion 56th Venice Biennale

(Image credit: Andrea Martínez)

"This new cartographic line traverses sites of political, economic, religious and finally, military power. Exposing the relation between architecture and power in the west. Working specifically for the Pavilion, Tania Candiani and Luis Felipe Ortega, decided to bring and develop the depiction in the exhibition space. It unfolded as a system that suctions water from the lagoon, fills the monument up, the liquid is moved through the sculpture and produces a refraction of images.

"Possessing nature" seeks to unearth what has been buried and bring to light the continual reinstatement of a control policy imposed during the colony, the determination to dewater the city. History repeats itself: digging deeper and deeper, the ambition to build the ‘best and largest public works in the world’. While power in this case is affirmed by the scale of hydraulic infrastructure; the obsession to control and possess the untamable, it extends violently to all spheres of life.