Imagined Place is the image of a contradiction – natural time, with its own rhythms and cycles, which defies the rigidity of timekeeping. What surrounds, frames, quantifies, and defines modern time is a boundary imposed as a system, as progress, and as success – the kind of success that drives and feeds the ego. This limitation is represented as a perfect and exact sphere governing time through mechanization of the system.

Yet within this lies the possibility of time that exists without mechanical measurement, of time governed by its own essence. Ma’t moxorik chuchomaxik – don’t go mad, live at nature’s pace – the elders would tell the children who asked about the infinity of time and space. The ancient ones advised that life on Earth follows its own rhythm, so long as the moon did its part, so long as the Earth rotated on its axis.... The birds, guided by instinct, perhaps by wisdom or simply because they were free, would fly south and north, announcing the arrival or retreat of the rain.

Poyón recalls that in the countryside, during the moments of planting the corn, beans, squash, chayote, and other crops, the Maya-Kaqchikel would work in silence while plowing the furrows. At the tops of the hills, among the trees, people would close their eyes to feel the breeze, sense the direction of the wind, observe the movement of the clouds and the heat; those were times when being part of the environment was an everyday occurrence. Imagined Place is a metaphor for natural life before the quantified limits of modernity. The birds that still fly remind us that, alongside the obsessive measurement of modern time, the time of flights and our ancestors still exists.

In the reflexive sense, the delimited domain of this piece – the bounded sphere that controls modern time – also exposes the restrictions of “national” radii or literal borders. It explores the violence directed against those who flee, enter, or exit with or without the permission of a system of law shaped by privilege and a bureaucratic labyrinth. Immigrants/illegals, they call them. People, animals, seeds, minerals are lost; they are no longer where they were born and grew up; their lives are spent far away; the only contact with the land where their roots and umbilical cords still remain happens through screens, from a distance – and seeing each other is merely a contemplation of memory, from afar, a present accompanied remotely, a future where returning is an wish, perhaps down a road from which there is no going back.

The flight of the azacuanes (a species of migratory raptors) reminds us that once, the land had no owners; people rotated the land for cultivation because “the land gets tired,” they used to say. Birds, insects, people, and the wind exchanged knowledge and seeds as a natural everyday occurence; now, sharing the life of seeds is illegal. A reflection that Poyón offers is: “What put us on the illegal side of history? What would have become of the lands and their peoples if colonization had not happened?” Hence, the Imagined Place: imagining the possible, dreaming, dying, and being reborn every day while we dream, “because they haven’t been able to colonize our dreams, kuxlan a wanima’ – rest in the breath of life.” 

María Jacinta Xón Riquiac