I remember seeing this landscape going back several years ago. I  remember seeing it when I used to drive through it on  the highway, sometimes as a  tourist, and other times when I went to make drawings of the ruins on excursions with my classmates at the art school —a common practice amongst beginners—. In the last few years, I have gone to explore it, and my father regularly accompanies me. On one of the trips, he told me, with certainty and indifference, that my grandmother used to come here often to sell her products in the village market, which surprised  me. He told me that she liked to come here because she used to meet her friends at this placeI often wonder why I feel pulled by some unseen force to come here. I  find comfort knowing that she and I came to the same place. Maybe she liked the ruins too, I don’t know. But becoming aware of this made a lot of sense to me. I like visiting ruins. They give me a fleeting glimpse of a lost and different time —different from the one that history books talk about—. Here multiple cities, societies and ceremonial centers were established for almost three thousand years before the colonization of those territories and this place is just one of many, as my story is one of many as well. That context is made up of  ruins and pre-Hispanic  materiality, as well as the  fragments of memories that I’ve encountered  unexpectedly through my  walks in these rural areas. It’s as if these memories were tepalcates spread all  around this place. With this frame of reference, I approach the context of this culture, and these remnants, to construct a point of view, to look at the world and also to make art.

Lissette Jiménez Díaz

 

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