The Eco-Aesthetics of Water. International Interdisciplinary Research Concepts and Projects

A SCIENCE OF IMAGE
Water is, par excellence, an interdisciplinary topic and an interdisciplinary research problem. Part of the broad spectrum of related disciplines is also aesthetic research, whose investigations are not reduced to the search for pictorial “beauty” in those works of art that represent aquatic surfaces—seas, lakes, canals—but rather make up a “science of image” (Bildwissenschaft in German) that explores the epistemic potential and discursive functions of all kinds of images in the debates about this essential liquid for life on the blue planet. Eco-aesthetic research, focused on visual representations of water in the past and the present, constitutes a different, stimulating and complementary knowledge for studies on, for example, hydraulic engineering or ecology.

In times of environmental crisis—the United Nations (2026) have declared a global “water bankruptcy” https://news.un.org/es/story/2026/01/1541043—it is worth reflecting on the modes of perception and visualization of this particular moment in time, in order to know the principles of the necessary collective awareness on this key issue and problem. Images not only document critical phenomena, such as desertification of agricultural landscapes or flooding of cities but also serve as stimuli and catalysts to develop resilient alternatives to the pervasive mismanagement of water.

Many photographs of dried-up lakes, where a boat ended trapped on the sand, or dramatic scenes of flooded cities, especially poor neighborhoods, with their inhabitants desperate at the loss of their possessions, circulate on social networks or in printed newspapers. Examples of this are the photographs in the press (Krieger, 2015) and also the documentary videos on television that expose, in all crudeness, the cyclical floods in the east of Mexico City, in popular neighborhoods that were built without administrative, urban, nor ecological control on the plains of what were once lakes in the Basin of Mexico.

Social contrast in Santa Fe, Mexico City.

 Oscar Ruiz

Beyond their possible sensationalist use—the so-called disaster porn—these images constitute the visual memory of the world and are related to the pictorial heritage of times before photography. Two examples in Mexico can illustrate this fact: in the early work of the great landscape painter José María Velasco we can record the continuous change from a lake city to a gradually dried up plateau; and in the vast work of engraver José Guadalupe Posada we find woodcuts that show the presumed progress of hydraulic works during the Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship at the end of the 19^th century: a flooded downtown Mexico City (Krieger, 2007).

The cyclical floods that the city suffers from are not “natural catastrophes;” they are catastrophes generated by human beings, as, for example, the establishment and development of cities on inadequate topographies, be they dry beds of ancient lakes or geological faults.

Flooding of the Miguel Alemán Viaduct, Mexico City.

 Alfredo Domínguez, La Jornada, 17 de abril de 2011

This is a paradigmatic conflict that dates back to the early foundations of human settlements typical of the Neolithic Revolution approximately 9000 years ago: the progress of human civilization with the creation of cities that guaranteed stable conditions for their inhabitants, altered and seriously damaged natural landscapes, largely due to the control of water by means of canals and dikes, and by the contamination of water with feces and garbage. Undoubtedly, the Cloaca Maxima in ancient Rome meant enormous progress in the hydraulic management of cities, as did the sanitary programs of European cities at the end of the 19th century. However, each step forward in the history of hydraulic engineering represented, at the same time, a delay in the care of ecosystems. Many of the engineering programs to control water flows did not solve the problems; on the contrary, they aggravated them: the vital and anarchic force of water flows is indomitable for the Homo faber (according to the anthropological definition, Homo faber is the creative man who dominates his environment with engineering and technological knowledge).

Examples of this are the human settlements in the Basin of Mexico, an endorheic basin with its ancient system of lakes with no natural outlet. Although the “balance” of the lake city of Tenochtitlan with its natural surroundings is often praised, it has been found that since the foundation of the Mesoamerican settlements 5000 years ago, the basin has never been the ideal place for a settlement (Brokmann Haro, 2025). This unsustainable trend, however, has developed since the Spanish Conquest to the extreme of the aquatic ecocide of the Mexican megalopolis in the 21st century (Krieger, 2025).

ECO-AESTHETIC RESEARCH
To understand this conflictive eco-history of the Basin and Mexico City, we have geological, archaeological, and urban research, adding aesthetics research that expresses this story and the current situation with images that require a detailed analysis, using the methods of art history transformed into Bildwissenschaft, which reviews visual constructions, their iconography, and their communication to interested and affected audiences.

Two cases illustrate and exemplify the subject, the problem, and its interpretation. A photograph published in the press in April 2011 in the then Federal District (now Mexico City or CDMX), shows the heavy rains that caused the partial flooding of the Miguel Alemán Viaduct. The visual construction of the shot is from a terrestrial perspective, that of someone affected by the floods; it is not the aerial view of control, a privilege of rulers, who order helicopter flights to “supervise” catastrophic scenarios, without getting their clothes wet like citizens and rescue crews (Krieger, 2015). It is a night shot, with only a few points of public lighting, which increases the dramatic effect. The outstanding narrative element is a containment fence on the urban highway, projected horizontally into the image, an absurd element, dysfunctional in this critical situation in which the avenue appears impossible to cross. Rainwater flows under this metal structure on the sidewalks—in iconographic terms this can be seen as a contemporary interpretation of the biblical motif of the flood, established in Mexico by the dominant religion since the Conquest (in other countries and regions of the world there are similar religious narratives that symbolize the natural history of the planet in its phases of crisis).

This motive revives the so-called aesthetics of catastrophe in 17^th century European painting, where floods, storms, and other extreme weather phenomena were presented as an aesthetic attraction, that could be safely viewed from the distance at museums or private salons—what philosopher Hans Blumenberg called “shipwreck with spectator.” It is also one of the principles in Hollywood’s blockbuster catastrophe cinema. The public’s “taste” for the brutal affectation of other citizens, those who sank in their cars on the Viaduct, is also understood as disaster porn, in which the spectators or readers of a newspaper are excited by the misery of others.

From the iconological point of view, this motif has been mentioned by Horace in ancient Greece as the “revenge of nature,” since we are talking about a violent return of the lake city, precisely on a road built over the piped La Piedad river. What once meant progress in hydraulic and infrastructural works became a disaster.

THIS VAST COLLECTION OF PRESS PHOTOGRAPHS OF ROAD FLOODING WORKS AS COUNTERIMAGES TO STATE PROPAGANDA

This vast collection of press photographs of road flooding—and even of the cyclical landslides in poor neighborhoods during the rainy season—function as counter-images to state propaganda; for example, of photographs in a representative book of the Department of the Federal District (DDF, before its reorganization as the Government of Mexico City and, today, CDMX), in which shots of the then regent of the city appear with the president of the Republic, inspecting in a jeep the enormous pipes of the Western Interceptor that in the 1960s was promoted as the maximum engineering progress (Gurza, 1964; Krieger, 2015). 

These propaganda photographs are integrated into an extensive collection of affirmative images of the corresponding political regimes, all over the world and in all times. Let’s cite the visual propaganda of the great—and ultimately failed—hydraulic works of Porfirio Díaz’s times in Mexico or, in the international realm, of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who ordered the drying up of the Pontine Lagoons since 1928, an infrastructure work that caused severe environmental damage, but which was praised as control of wetlands and water flows. With this fiction of control, seen in photographic documents, Mussolini was updating a notion by Niccolò Machiavelli, who at the beginning of the 16^th century outlined the control of water as a metaphor for the control of citizens. Global history abounds in hydraulic works whose ideology is based on Machiavelli’s political theory—and there are also many illustrations that document these projects. There is a whole political iconography about water that is used to reaffirm the corresponding political system, in monarchies, dictatorships, even in democracies (in these cases, determined by technocrats). No politician in the world, throughout the history of civilization, can resist the temptation of presenting himself as the victor of the anarchic flows of water. 

However, as I showed in the case of the photograph of the flooded Viaduct, counter-images of the one-dimensional progress of unsustainable hydraulic engineering also abound. Nota bene: of course, there are currently proposals with environmental intelligence, such as the treatment of wastewater by biological means [see pp. 310 in this issue] or the urbanistic proposal of the “sponge cities” (Krieger, 2021) [see pp. 276 in this issue]. Against the media hegemony of irresponsible politicians and their engineers, with their construction companies, photographs of the places of aquatic environmental crime exist and circulate. Among them, for example, are the floods of the Artz Shopping Center, whose construction destroyed one of the last remnants of the Pedregal de San Ángel in Mexico City, an area of high bio- and geo-diversity that emerged after the eruption of the Xitle volcano in the 3th century. Although investors, as well as the authorities of Mexico City—the then head of government and the Secretariat of Urban Development and Housing (SEDUVI)—celebrated this mega-commercial insertion in a valuable ecosystem, reality revealed another facet, its destructive nature: with heavy rains in 2016 and 2022, the Magdalena River gained strength and flooded the lower parts of this shopping mall. In addition, due to erroneous calculations by the Sordo Madaleno company (which carried out the architectural design, engineering, and real estate development all at once), in 2018 a part of the façade collapsed, a fact that left a mnemonic impression among the capital’s population that this unsustainable project suffers a process of continuous self-destruction.

Not so obvious is the environmental critique of another shopping mall in Mexico City through photography. At first glance it seems an environmental and even atmospheric achievement to put an artificial water mirror in the facilities of globalized and standardized consumerism in Coyoacán. In commercial terms, this artificial “lake” successfully stimulates consumers in this mall called Oasis. It seems appropriate to call an enclave of consumerism within the megalopolitan desert an “oasis.” The aquatic substance provides a cool microclimate and a pleasant aesthetic—which seem to be favorable conditions for customers of the middle and upper sectors. However, this is where the problem lies, since only an economically consolidated sector is capable of enjoying this microclimate, while the marginalized population of the city lives in adverse conditions, with extreme water scarcity, little vegetation, and heat bubbles; in addition to doing their shopping not in the air-conditioned spaces of an artificial “oasis” of consumerism, but in a street market, under a hot sun.

NO POLITICIAN IN THE WORLD, THROUGHOUT THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION, CAN RESIST THE TEMPTATION OF PRESENTING HIMSELF AS THE CHAMPION OF THE ANARCHIC FLOWS OF WATER

Situations like these prove the hypothesis that water is a substance that encourages extreme segregation in Mexico City and in other megacities of the Global South. Countless photographs—compare, for example, the abundant watering of grass in a private garden of a mansion in Lomas de Chapultepec with the dusty streets of Iztapalapa where a tanker bus circulates—illustrate this socio-environmental problem.

However, there is no guarantee that the perception of these critical situations and their visual representations generate ecological awareness. The happy consumers in the “oasis” apply the psychological mode of cognitive dissonance: they recognize, perhaps, the serious problems of the megacity, such as the unsustainable management of water, atmospheric pollution, and even the exclusionary socio-territorial organization, but they enjoy arriving in their opulent and polluting vans to the oasis of consumerism to immerse themselves in the artificial, bright worlds of the shopping mall with its artificial lake.

So, the act of visualizing environmental problems around water is not a linear illustration process but requires the analytical support and educational impact of eco-aesthetic studies.

Oasis Mall, Coyoacán, Mexico City.

  Ximena Gómez

AQUAPOLIS AND INTER-DISCIPLINE
As a conclusion for this brief reflection on the crisis of the aquapolis, the former lake city that became a dried-up territory sealed with asphalt and concrete, I include a short list of UNAM’s interdisciplinary projects in which the Bildwissenschaft contributes with innovative methodologies and knowledge to the analysis of environmental issues and problems of the current geochronological epoch—established by Crutzen (2002), but not accepted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS)—of the Anthropocene.

These are projects, proposals, based on the contemplation, observation, and aesthetic conceptualization of nature, which produce sensory cognition through images and thereby generate unexpected propositional results within a scheme of interdisciplinary research on the environment.

One of the many projects of the University Program for Interdisciplinary Soil Studies (PUEIS, https://pueis.cic.unam.mx/) is the one on The Water Forest (publication in preparation), which is of vital importance for the near future of Mexico City and its metropolitan area, in terms of the hydrographic condition of the Basin of Mexico. This area is key for the water recharge of the aquifers, from which drinking water is extracted through wells. These are conservation soils where rainwater is filtered. However, on these soils of environmental value, illegal constructions arise that seal off natural surfaces and hinder water cycles. This is the contribution of eco-aesthetics: capturing anthropogenic interferences in the photographic image, analyzing them, and disseminating them as a means of environmental education.

Part of the problem is the circular supply of water extracted from agricultural fields in the west of the State of Mexico, consumed and contaminated in Mexico City and then “exported” as sewage to the Mezquital Valley, east of the city. The multiple images of dry and highly polluted fields are part of the aesthetics of the Anthropocene, in which human beings deploy an almost geological force on natural landscapes. Many water users in the city, who irrigate the ornamental, exotic vegetation of their private gardens, or who wash their cars with excessive amounts of water, are unaware of the consequences of their irresponsible actions—they only turn the tap on, but do not reflect on the systemic and environmental problems. Against such omnipresent ignorance the educational mission of eco-aesthetics has been launched, claiming the right to the lake city and its Water Forest.

Another project with a contribution from geo-aesthetics, a subcategory of eco-aesthetics (Krieger, 2022), is GeoCity (SECIHTI and the Institute of Geophysics, among other UNAM dependencies), which investigates the remaining volcanic stony grounds (pedregales) of southern Mexico City, where some 80 square kilometers of lava fields extended geo-historically and of which only 2.64 square kilometers remain in the Pedregal de San Ángel Ecological Reserve (REPSA), and a few other fragments. The impact of hyper-urbanization in the Basin of Mexico has generated a dramatic situation for this ecosystem of essential importance, also for the hydrographic constitution, due to the filtration of rainwater. In addition to the ecosystem functions, its urban-aesthetic qualities also make the restoration of the pedregales a relevant objective, which includes the archaeology of vestiges of the high Mesoamerican culture of Cuicuilco.

And, last but not least, the REPSA (http://www.repsa.unam.mx/), an extraordinary space worldwide, preserved as a reserve since 1983 by UNAM authorities, is a field of interdisciplinary research, in which eco-aesthetics even generates concepts and initiatives for its integral conservation, for example, around the problem of abuse of wild nature as an illegal garbage dump (Krieger, 2026), which also affects, in slow but persistent processes, the aquifers of the Basin of Mexico, in its volcanic areas. Documentary photos of the REPSA have been analyzed as images of the environmental crime scene, outlining the concept of eco-aesthetics as a forensic science.

All these ideas and initiatives of eco-aesthetic research on water are also extended to the larger scale of landscapes and as part of an international comparison scheme. In particular, a bilateral research project is already underway with the Education University of Hong Kong (see https://www.rccapv.com/about-rccapv), which analyzes the political iconography of dams and their visual propaganda, both in China and in Mexico during the second half of the 20^th century.

As I mentioned before, at least since Machiavelli’s time, water control has been a political issue that receives its legitimation through propaganda images. And in this case too, counter-images emerge, for example, in the paintings and installations of the outstanding Chinese artist Shan Yang, one of the pioneers and protagonists of ecocritical art in his country. Not only documentary photography, but also the abstract language of conceptual art can generate productive provocations for interdisciplinary reflections on the critical condition of unsustainable water management in many parts of the world.

This ongoing collaboration reclaims the importance of image studies in political-environmental contexts, in addition to promoting innovative projects at the international level, in this case with colleagues from Hong Kong, with support by UNAM’s Centre for Mexican Studies in China.

Art installation, Shan Yang, Beijing, 2015.

 Peter Krieger

---