Guardian Mexico City weekCities This article is more than 8 years oldUsing public toilets all over Mexico City completely changed the way I viewed it
This article is more than 8 years oldThe Mexican capital’s lavatories may not cope with its creaking sewage system, but what they lack in efficiency they make up for in creative design
I began photographing bathrooms in Mexico City more than a decade ago, when I got a severe case of salmonella that degenerated into chronic ulcerative colitis. Over the several years that I watched helplessly as the life drained out of my rear end, I visited more public bathrooms than anyone else in Mexico City. Running to bathrooms all over the city fundamentally changed the way I viewed it.
In Mexico City, even when your bodily waste gets sucked down the toilet, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll never see it again. The stuff that I and more than 20 million others living in the city dump into its toilets each day sails on a long, strange voyage beneath the streets, through 6,000 miles of pipes, 68 pumping stations and almost 100 miles of canals, tunnels, dykes and artificial lakes that transport these agua negras in and around the city.
Due to leaky or burst pipes, human waste escapes and leeches into the earth below the city – but this underground sea of shitty sludge doesn’t always stay underground. During our rainy seasons, the aguas negras often surge back up to the surface within Mexico City, flooding homes and spreading disease. The sewage also has a way of filtering back into the pipes carrying clean water here.
Like water, bodily waste has its own cycle: from toilets to cracked pipes to the earth, into our water systems that eventually dry out and send particles into the air, then back to the city as brown rain, settling on food being sold on the street, leading to diarrhoea that is discharged into public bathrooms.
When it comes to gastrointestinal infections, Mexico City ranks No 1 in the world. It is estimated that about 90% of adults in the city are infected with Helicobacter pylori parasites (a leading cause of gastritis and stomach ulcers, among other things) – you need only visit a local public bathroom to hear the effects that these parasites have on human beings.
With so many different available sources (food, water, air), I am constantly consuming a steady diet of faecal matter and parasites. This keeps me running to bathrooms all over the city, which in turn gives me new photo opportunities. This ongoing series can be read as an autobiography – a record of my movements – physical as well as bowel – around Mexico City: cantinas, restaurants, parking lots, government buildings, public bathrooms …
But it can also be taken as a visual documentation of Mexican architecture and interior design. Unlike bathrooms in most European and US cities, there is no sanitary code that dictates exactly how toilets, urinals and sinks must be constructed. Throughout Mexico City, and especially in its poorer neighbourhoods, public bathrooms are often constructed by people who are neither architects nor professional plumbers.
As a result, these spaces often reflect an incredible sense of creativity, improvisation and illogic. Public bathrooms are a fine example of popular culture, yet are never recognised as such. I’ve come to see them as a kind of “architectural unconscious”: a space intentionally hidden from view.
In its way, my photography series documents Mexico City’s tourist attractions – the cultural patrimony that is promoted in magazines, books and films as the impressive image of the city. It’s just that, in my case, I point my camera at the part of the building that is always left out, avoided, denied. I see it as my duty to work against all those superficial, hygienic, promotional views of the city that delete the raw material, sickness and death from our culture.
Kurt Hollander is a writer, photographer, and author of Several Ways to Die in Mexico City
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJuZqbamv45rZ2ptX6O8t3uQa2atp6Wneq6x16KaqGWTnsG6edCuoKujqWLBsLXLnqus