Ilaria Strocchia's "Where Water Has Memory" - Image of Research 2025

Water. Drops that remember, that long for the past. Scattered drops flow and settle fluidly on the windows of the Torre Latinoamericana in Mexico City. From the city’s depths, the modern and imposing building emerges, opening up a view toward a vast and complex megalopolis, where spaces and times crowd together, shrink, and overlap, evoking images of the ancient five lakes that once covered the Mexico Valley. I took this photo in July 2024, during a research trip for my doctoral thesis, which examines the city’s deep relationship with its lacustrine past in Hispanic contemporary literature. Where Mexico City stands today, the Spanish crown began the imperial project of New Spain in the 16th century. As part of it, a centuries-long process of territorial transformation took shape through the systematic draining of the Valley. Though only traces remain of these ancient lakes, torrential rains, devastating floods, and fluid ground continue to swallow up the city while reviving its memory. Water thus remains the region’s vital force, repeatedly returning to reclaim its ancestral space. This ongoing cycle challenges any definitive solution to the centuries-old negotiation between anthropocentrism and nature in the Mexico Valley, as the landscape continues to resist human determinism.