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 place.
I 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.