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Xavier Ribas |
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Invisible Structures 2006 "One is always crossing the horizon, yet it always remains distant" Robert Smithson
These images represent tangled fragments of jungle, with no horizon, discontinuous, indifferent, interchangeable. (It is difficult to retrace one's steps in the rainforest). These images 'bursting with jungle' represent the edges of archaeological excavations, they look outwards, trying to capture an unconstructed space. At first glance, these images make us think of a wild space, natural, undefined, as if without motif. However, this disorganized and entropic space is, in fact, a historical site, the site (niche) of a buried city beneath the rainforest floor. The sprawl of the city, made up of squares, roads and common residential structures, is of secondary archaeological interest compared to its ceremonial centres and elite residential areas, and it tends to remain unexcavated, deep in the rainforest, estranged from the work of archaeological documentation and historical interpretation that begins exploring from the center. This 'periphery' of the city, and in a sense of archaeology, or of history, is the subject of this work. Paradoxically, the presence of this historical memory of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization can be perceived more intensely in its overgrown invisibility than in the reconstructed spaces of the archaeological parks, which are somehow disappointing in their inevitable similarity to the character and aesthetics of theme parks. The archaeological parks tend to be spaces designed with an urban mentality and for tourism (entrance fees, souvenirs, toilets, etc). In the rainforest, however, the perception and the intuition of something that is hidden offers us a more apt framework to appreciate this historical presence. The mounds which denote buried ceremonial or residential structures, and which could be perceived at first glance as 'small jungle-covered hills'; the distances between them concertinaed by an impenetrable vegetation; the traces left by the archaeological excavations, now filled in, the earth less densely packed, mediate more effectively than the reconstructed landscapes and monuments of the archaeological parks. The images propose that we approach this historical site not from the point of view of the visible and the ordered, but via the spatial and temporal 'suspension' of its historical materiality. The memory that is represented in these images is not the monument, but a projection, a threshold, a memory 'which is not yet', or that is as yet 'unthought', as in a state of 'inversion' (Robert Smithson). Or, a memory which, simply, does not let itself be thought, as if the rainforest was not only the direct consequence of the desolation and the crumbling of a civilization, but also the necessary strategy for the preservation of its fragments: we could say that it hides itself, that it buries itself and that it eludes us. These images have been taken in the remote archaeological site of Waka', Reserva de la Biosfera Maya, El Petén, Guatemala, in March 2006. The author would like to acknowledge the collaboration and help of the Proyecto Arqueológico Waka', directed by David Freidel (Southern Methodist University, Dallas) and Héctor Escobedo (Universidad San Carlos, Guatemala), and especially of the project archaeologists: David Lee, Damien Marken, Griselda Pérez, Jennifer Piehl, Varinia Matute, Fabiola Quiroa, Michelle Rich, Laura Gámez, Juan Carlos Meléndez, Ana Lucia Arroyave, Juan Carlos Ramírez, Olivia Farr and Keith Eppich. Thanks also to Tomás Barrientos (Universidad del Valle, Guatemala), Martín Asturias and Arturo Godoy.
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