Chucho Ocampo | Invisible Infrastructures

INVISIBLE INFRASTRUCTURES
Give meaning to what is hidden

The ground we walk on is composed of layers of history: infrastructure, vegetation, animals, and humans who once inhabited our lands and were hidden over time by the continuous movement of materials within the Earth’s crust. These materials form a collection of layers that act as historical deposits, combined with sedimentary layers from deep geological times.

The infrastructure buried beneath our cities conceals environmental and political dimensions that can be brought together and examined through geophysical survey fieldwork combined with artistic interventions. This is the process we followed with the Acequia Madre de Querétaro, a 16th-century hydraulic infrastructure that provided drinking water to the city for hundreds of years.

In the 18th century, due to water pollution, the function of the Acequia was replaced by an aqueduct, and it was relegated to functioning as a canal into which waste was dumped, causing its slow deterioration. Today, this hydraulic system lies hidden beneath the first quadrant of the city of Querétaro.

How can we make sense of all that is hidden? What tools can we use to access what has been forgotten, and what can it tell us about our current situation regarding water management? Are these layers of infrastructure and neglect part of our history and our heritage?

This exhibition showcases the results of an art project that sought to unearth answers through research in the museum’s collections, numerous geolocation exercises, map overlays, and several field trips. During these trips, we used Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to irradiate the subsoil beneath the streets of Querétaro with electromagnetic energy, searching for images that would reveal clues to the forgotten infrastructure of the Acequia irrigation canal.

The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections. The first,Geology: a portal to the invisible It displays in its entirety the RPT records or radargrams taken between January and July 2025 in the Historic Center of Querétaro and envelops us in images of electromagnetic waves that, at the same time, give texture to the exhibition; the second, Measuring in public: desirable interferences, problematizes through video recordings of the fieldwork of this project to understand how the Acequia distributed water and the way in which scientific measurements made in public humanize science and generate awareness; the third Speculating with tools of the past: contemporary sculptures proposes a series of interfaces inspired by ancient measuring instruments to find in the methods of the past the origin of our current scientific instruments and, finally, in Invisible heritage: learning from ghosts The research process on water management that led to this exhibition is made transparent, highlighting the layers of the past that lie beneath our feet, in our memories.

Thus, the exhibition Invisible Infrastructures seeks to build links between art, science and technology to look at those elements that build our memories and our heritage from a contemporary perspective, to observe how the sedimented layers of the past form the density of what we call heritage today.

All images in this article: Chucho Ocampo, Invisible Infrastructures, 2025. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist.