What we see here is a moment experienced, a fleeting instant just before dawn or right after the sun has set – what one might observe when traveling away from the lake in the early hours, or when approaching it. It’s a perspective of movement, of transition. A clarity found at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, perhaps in summer, or maybe during the rainy season. The landscape along the road is composed of mountains sacrificed so that human life can move faster, mountains split and cut to build highways, to pass through. The systems of rapid mobilization inflict harm on life. “Humans harm life, causing damage is part of our everyday existence. What comes next? What more harm will we inflict?” reflects Chavajay.

The black substance that drips over the watercolors in this piece is used oil – used oil that alters the landscape, much like modern daily life. The impact on the landscape is the intervention of something unnatural. The dripping is intentional, but how it flows over the paper is unplanned. “It’s like the process of industrialization: the process pollutes the air and its very existence contaminates life. We create it and it comes back to us: the damage is returned, nothing disappears,” says the artist.

The moon appears within the gloom, at the beginning or the end of the day. Its roundness is never complete in any of Chavajay’s pieces – it’s always missing a stitch, a knot, or has too much thread; visually, it represents the prospect of what is permissible and feasible, a hope that never fully believes in a chance. The unfinished roundness of the embroidered moon alludes to the 20-day lunar calendar system with 13 numbers, a 260-day cycle. The embroidered moon appearing in Chavajay’s works symbolizes a dream he envisioned, “or maybe it’s the other way around,” he muses. It’s a tribute to the experience of Grandmother Moon, who forever weaves and embroiders time, who plays with the tides of the sea and of Lake Atitlán.

Watching Grandmother Moon as she embroiders time, while the lake plays with the full or new moon, is a moment that Manuel Chavajay reclaims with his family. Together with his wife and children, they welcome the Moon in its various phases with incense, petals, and candles. On the day of imox, the “lunar day of water,” they offer incense, petals, and candles to the lake and to the Moon.

“The Moon is always there, but we only see it partially, or not at all. It’s hidden by the mist, concealed by the rain – it appears, it’s there, or it’s not. Our eyes have a capacity that no camera can capture; observing the Moon is an experience that allows us to understand the rhythm of nature. The presence of the Moon is a conjunction of things, of moments, of clouds, beings, wind, and water,” says Chavajay. This work was exhibited at Arco Madrid in 2023. 

María Jacinta Xón Riquiac