clarissa tossin: Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing (2022), as its trilingual title indicates, considers the translation and resignification of forms of language across the Maya diaspora, including glyphs, music, healing, and time-keeping practices. Building on Tossin’s earlier film Ch’u Mayaa (2017), about the modernist appropriation of Indigenous motifs, Mojo’q che traces the movement of Maya peoples and their cultural belongings across multiple spaces and temporalities. At the John Sowden House in Los Angeles, built by Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. in the twentieth-century style known as “Mayan Revival,” Tossin documents Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal drafting glyphs and calendars that seem to activate and heal the house’s appropriated details. K’iche ’Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez, the other film’s protagonist, moves through the vernacular architectures of her community in the western highlands of Guatemala, using poetry to articulate ritual practices that preserve Indigenous systems of knowledge.

Echoing throughout Mojo’q che are sounds coming from 3D-printed replicas of Maya wind instruments—bird-shaped ocarinas and flutes representing Maya deities. That Tossin’s initial plan to activate certain wind instruments held in pre-Columbian museum collections was hampered by institutional systems of conservation and display speaks to the film’s wider task of reckoning with the gaps produced by acts of dislocation. Translation implies imagining what the

(now static and silent) instruments were used for, and animating them, despite these gaps, to generate alternate space-time configurations between past and present.

– Mariana Fernández