Ariella Azoulay’s work Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019) touches upon notions of time in the context of Empire building. She asserts that the project of Empire is interested in framing the past as part of a far-removed, untouchable, and undebatable time long ago. We are made to understand, for example, the success of the conquest of Mexica to have been definitive and total. Deeper research and the study texts such as the Florentine Codex, from which these paintings are copied and collaged, provide scholars and artists with the opportunity to see that conquest was anything but linear or straightforwardly successful.In fact, Azoulay’s notes on time opened up my thinking around how it may be more advantageous to undertstand the colonial efforts of conquest as persistent and cyclical -- as is the ongoing active resistance to them. Any historical event is porous, influenced by the moments preceding and following it -- and our interpretation of these events needs to be continually open to reassessment and the opportunity to read liberatory potential into moments of struggle previously understood to be foreclosed.