Album: Cantera Oriente [2024, Bosque Vacío]

1. Subterránea

2. Subacuática

3. Manantial

4. Lluvia

about

“…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… more

credits

releases August 9, 2024

All tracks by Leena Lee and Guillermo Guevara

Mixing and mastering: Guillermo Guevara

Field recording of “Subacuática” courtesy of Robertina Šebjanič

Drone image courtesy of María Antonia González Valerio

Special thanks to Arte + Ciencia research group of the National Autonomous University of México, María Antonia González Valerio, and Robertina Šebjanič.

Design: Leena Lee and Kate Carr