Arid caustics


Mérida knows how to devour itself, especially when we look away for a while.

At times comes the wish that this place might stay just as it is—windowless, unfurnished, ready to take another course, a less domesticated one, where rain finally floods it, where plants silently pierce the floor and claim the walls, and where, in a couple of years or half a lifetime, birds begin sharing the space in shifts with a family of bats, until falling drops carve the limestone and reach the water below.

Does a house end when it’s inhabited, or when it’s named? For now, this space remains open to what it might become: a ruin, an observatory, a microcosm, a cenote, a landscape between walls of concrete that breathes the longing of a jungle trapped within the city.

The unfinished is also possibility.