Video on DVD, no sound. 7’

Castillo Deball’s work explores material culture and the two basic forms of narrative discourse: history and story telling. Contrasting the circular temporality of the myth with the lineal temporality of the historical discourse, the artist deconstructs official narratives in favour of a personal and fragmentary perspective, where the fracture between the subject who remembers and what is remembered is widened. This video presents two narratives, the Aztec myth of the goddess Coatlicue and her daughter the moon goddess Coyolxauhqui dismembered by the sun as a punishment, and a popular traditional story about a hunter who devours himself. Both stories remit to an action where the moment of narrating implies a refiguration in time. In contrast with these narratives, images are presented of archaeological excavations in Mexico City in the 1970s; these digs took place as a result of the chance finding of a circular stone disk representing the image of the moon goddess. Contaminated by stories of dismembering and autophagy, the nationalist discourse of history devours itself, leaving behind disperse signs of absence and shreds of meaning.