Afterimages of History
I began copying images from Mayan and Aztec codices and lienzos dating to the time of colonial contact in order to reenter pictorial records of the conquest of Mesoamerica by Spanish conquistadors.
For this series, I worked with images from two texts. The Tovar Codex is a 16th century Mexican manuscript attributed to Jesuit priest Juan de Tovar and featuring the work of Aztec painters. It narrates the history of the Aztecs to the fall of Tenochtitlan. The Codex Aubin is a pictorial history of the Mexican people dating to 1576, created by indigenous artists, that detailed their departure from Aztlán and subsequent colonial events.
In working with these images, I experimented with the doubling or erasing of subject positions that have become fixed archetypes in discussions of rise and fall of the Aztec empire. Doubling and erasing archetypes – and swaths of the image – helped me to layer and expand the narrow significations we have received from those tellings of history.
My work is inspired to the work of Ariella Azoulay’s book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, in which she explores “non-imperial exercises of time” that undo simple and reductive tellings of history and return them to spaces of opacity. Rendered opaque, these histories can be read anew for alternative through-lines – such as for histories of resistance, mutual aid, and revolutionary organizing that figured as prominently as betrayal and defeat in colonial contexts.
Copying and altering images from Mesoamerica codices opened up a second sight of history for me – a questioning of received interpretations of these primary texts – and allowed me to posit the anticolonial struggle apparent in these codex images not as failed, but as ongoing.
afterimages of history series: tower of doubles II (Codex Aubin, leaf 41r), Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
afterimages of history series: tower of doubles I (Codex Aubin, leaf 41r), Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
afterimages of history series: an embattled march (“Guerra contia Cuyuacan”, Codex Tovar, p. 205), Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
ritual work across time (“Tula” and “Sacerdotes de los Idolos”, Codex Tovar, pp. 174 and 252), Photo: Rachel Topham Photography