UC San Diego

Ch'ik'xulub: A Non-Visible Crater is an installation based on a fictive story about a scientist from the 1960's who is studying the connection of Earth to the Universe through ancient Mayan science and history. The story is inspired on my grandparent's archive and my research on the Chicxulub asteroid’s impact. This work creates a dialogue between the heterogenous as life/death, macro/micro, organic/inorganic, Yucatan/Baja California peninsulas and real/unreal facts.

Ch'ik'xulub:A Non-Visible Crater brings together time through geological, cultural, and biographical memories with videomicrography, archive, objects, sound, sculpture, and a collaborative piece of embroideries.

The story began with me visiting cenotes (caves with water) to abstract fragments of the sites as soil, water, and invisible microorganisms, then photomicrographing them to make an embroidered cartography in collaboration with Mayan women from La Hermita at Oxkutzcab Yucatan.

Everything changed when I dreamed of my posthumous grandfather, who was a scientist. He started sending me his super 8 reels from La Hermita. I wrote him letters and he responded; through this series of fictive correspondence we go back to the Mayan mythologies and sociocultural history along with other contemporary issues. My grandfather and I are thinking about what our real home is? We know that we belong to the specific place where were conceived because everything is connected; therefore, the site is merged into the dynamic of engendering. We connected this idea to the fact that my daughter recognized as home the rock where she was conceived. Our potential homes are in different states of Mexico; Yucatan and Tamaulipas (both lands affected by the Chicxulub asteroid impact). In my fiction I connect Baja California to this macro cosmical event because of the constant movements of Earth's plate tectonics.