One of the aims of Tindaya Variations is to situate the controversy described above in today’s Fuerteventura, amongst its touristy landscapes and the scars of the 2008 crisis.  These offer a necessary counterpoint to the grand plans of the state, as well as an insight into the results of years of “development”. Indeed, at least to an extent, Tindaya’s is a dispute over the future: over what counts as “progress” and the place of indigenous heritage within it.

The modern, prosperous future projected by the state through the construction of Eduardo Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance has not arrived. Arguably, Tindaya stands today as an unintended monument to the ruins of a grand modernity envisaged in the language of economic development and artistic abstraction. However, it also represents the possibility of enacting other, minoritarian futures, connected to the poorly understood indigenous lifeworlds attached to the mountain and its surroundings.

Indeed, activists have insisted, for over two decades, in making public the sacred mountain of the mahos, and asked to place it at the centre of the island’s future. Perhaps their actions can be taken as the starting point for the enactment of less grand, less monumental futures. Futures in which indigenous lifeworlds are not anecdotal evidence of an era not only past but surpassed (that is, proof of the self-fulfilling prophecy of progress), but a tool for extricating our political imagination of the future from the restrictions of progress, development, growth, etc.

How would taking care of Tindaya look like, if it were understood as the task of caring for its untold histories and cultivating (im)possible futures for it? I would argue that taking care and responsibility for the imagination of the future – envisaging the not-yet differently – is one step towards escaping the homogenous time of modern progress and pluralising temporality in an act of “temporal sovereignty”.¹ 

1. Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2017.