Along Periférico, 2021
Kamen Stoyanov & Katharina Swoboda
video, 4k, color, sound, 14:30 min, 2021
Music: Hotta Seiji and Juan Forero

The short film was shot at the Periférico highway in Mexico-City. It depicts the section of the two-
storied highway, where vertical gardens are attached at the pillars. The shots follow a stringent
rhythm between the shot size: views in front and back with fixed alternation of the focal lens. The
film was shot in March 2020 shortly before Mexico-City´s first measurements against the spread
of Covid. The last shot shows a figure on a skyscraper and an air plane leaving Mexico – we
filmed this shot shortly before our return flight to Austria. We compressed shots from three days
filmed during the magic hour.

One narrative of the Covid crises was, that the air quality cities improves and that nature can
restore itself with less human emissions. This is an interesting correlation with the vertical
gardens at Périferico: These gardens, it was promised, should produce oxygen for 25,000
residents, filter 27,000 tons of toxic gases, and collect more than 5,000 kilograms of particulate
matter and 10,000 kilograms of heavy metals. Whether and how the plants would be able to
achieve this, however, was neither proved with scientific data nor explained in detail.