On the Implausibility of Radiance

On the Implausibility of Radiance is an edited document of Resplandor Teotihuacan, a tourist attraction consisting of a video mapping projected onto the exterior of the pyramid of Teotihuacan in Mexico. The video and audio in this show speculate by reciting a multitude of creation myths that range from Toltec, Mixtec, Zapotec, and the Aztec who found the abandoned city in the 1400’s and gave the pyramid it’s name Teotihuacan or pyramid of the sun. The show has become a cultural heritage controversy as the pyramid had to be retrofitted with lights and speakers for the nightly spectacle and archaeologists, locals, and activist groups have become concerned this retrofitting and the reverberation from the nightly show is incrementally causing cracks in the pyramid to get larger thereby slowly destroying it. The paradox of this historical injunction seeks to remember its unknown origins, not as genesis but as accumulations and aggregates of stories complicated by the simultaneous collective will to destroy the very site that is the object of the history it seeks to tell. The will to propagate these origin stories is both the cause and effect of the inevitable alteration of both the real and imagined histories the site elicits, and by suturing one history through language the object of history is left in limbo.