The project was developed as part of the program Jovenes Creadores (young creators) of the National Fund for Art and Culture, in Mexico. The project consisted in documenting and analyzing the way in which a community mainly formed by Guatemalan migrants inhabited an active landfill near the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala. The goal of the research was to observe the way in which they, in their day-to-day produced spaces by establishing different relations within the territory.

As the object of the project were not the spaces themselves but rather their production processes, traditional architectural representation methods, due to their oversimplifying and static nature, were pointless. Instead, four alternative methods of representation were employed. The first, closer to traditional architectural representation, was hand drawing with ink, allowing the accidental nature and messiness of the ink on paper to take place, embracing the unforeseen in an analogical manner to which these structures are lifted in the territory. The second was a video documenting the day-to-day use of the ephemeral spaces created by the inhabitants of the landfill, from humans to dogs to machines and so on. It is particularly interesting to observe the horizontal quality of the relations established. The human does not have higher hierarchical value above animals, machines and other matter. The third was a compilation of satellite images from different years where it is possible to observe the geological impact and change that all the seemingly small actions happening in the landfill plus the constant input of garbage has occasioned in the territory. Finally, a set of samples were taken from the landfill and later cultivated in petri dishes. The intention was to literally bring a fragment of the landfill to a museum 1500 km away and to show how four different agents interacted, and by doing so, configured spaces. Moreover, the petri dishes had different conditions from one to another, proving that the configurations that emerged were the product of the whole, and that if one variable changed, so did the result.

The project was exhibited in the Museum of “Identidades Leonesas” in Leon, Mexico.