This website is a companion to the film Tindaya Variations. It is designed to connect it to the larger research project it is part of – an investigation of the controversy surrounding the mountain of Tindaya in Fuerteventura (Canary Islands). The site is designed for larger screens and won’t work as intended on mobile devices.
Tindaya is several things at once: a listed indigenous archaeological site, a protected environment, a mining resource and the designated location of a monumental suspended public art work. Tindaya Variations unpacks this contentious multiplicity. The film can be watched here.
Each section of this website is built around a combination of text and image. The videos are thematic remixes of parts of Tindaya Variations. The texts are divided into two layers, and you can switch between using the numbers above.
This is the first layer; it is mostly descriptive and uses non-technical language (you may need to scroll within the text area to read it all).
This is the second layer; it explores conceptual and theoretical issues. The texts are based on – they are variations of – the following academic publications:
Marrero-Guillamón, Isaac. 2020. ‘Monumental Suspension: Art, Infrastructure, and Eduardo Chillida’s Unbuilt Monument to Tolerance’. Social Analysis 64 (3): 26–47. Link.
Marrero-Guillamón, Isaac. 2021. More than a mountain: the contentious multiplicity of Tindaya. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (3): 496-517. Link.
The mountain of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands) is the inner part of a now eroded volcano, some 20 million years old. In 1979, a local amateur archaeologist discovered hundreds of indigenous engravings near the top. Further studies confirmed the importance of the archeological site, and the centrality of the mountain for the maho people that inhabited the island before it was colonised by Spain in the 15th Century.
As a result, the mountain was listed as an Asset of Cultural Interest in 1985. Soon after it was also listed as a Natural Monument, due to its environmental singularity. Despite its “protected” status, however, the state also granted mining licenses which resulted in three quarries where the mountain’s rock was extracted.
How is it possible that the state institutions both protected the mountain and allowed rock extraction from it? It could be an instance of institutional incompetence, even negligence. But it could also be the case that this duplicity reflects a logic of separation, or “purification”,1 at the centre of the modern Western State. The latter’s distribution of reality into airtight domains such as culture, economy or nature, each associated to separate and independent administrative bodies working in parallel, made it possible that Tindaya was simultaneously protected and exploited within the law. The resulting “partitioned mountain” is but an instance of the ontology of the “moderns”;2 an ontology in which nature, culture, economy, energy, education, security, health, etc. are distinct domains, with their own legal regimes and managed by different teams of experts and/or bureaucrats.
1. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
2. Latour, Bruno, ed. Reset Modernity! Cambridge, MA: MIT Press / ZKM Karlsruhe, 2016.
In 1993, the Governments of Fuerteventura and the Canary Islands set out to address the mountain’s problematic duplicity as a protected site and a mining resource. They commissioned a Special Protection Plan. The team working on it develped the idea of a “Cultural Resort” – an integrated approach built around the mountain’s multiple “values” (ethnographic, archeological, cultural, historical, geological, etc.).1
In order to achieve this vision, it was paramount to stop the quarrying activity. They proposed that the mining rights be compulsory purchased, but the government found the strategy too expensive and encouraged the team to find cheaper alternatives. At that point, the idea of an artistic intervention in the quarries started to take shape. The idea was to invite an artist who could reimagine the rock extraction in a way that was both respectful with the landscape and that honoured the companies’ rights so that the mining could be brought to an end. That person ended up being Eduardo Chillida.
Once he saw the mountain, Chillida abandoned the idea of a restorative intervention in the quarries, and proposed something altogether different. Digging a huge cubic cave inside the mountain, connected to the outside by an entry tunnel and two vertical shafts. Chillida’s proposal radically changed the scenario. Politicians, for one, were deeply seduced by the idea of having “a Chillida”. So much so that they declared the project of “regional interest”, found monies to purchase the mining rights, and abandoned the idea of a Special Protection Plan to concentrate instead in the promotion and planning of the Monument.
This turn of events, however, galvanised environmental and pro-heritage activists, who grouped under the umbrella of the Coordinadora Montaña Tindaya in 1996. Since then, they have argued that the Monument is incompatible with the mountain’s protected status, and have used a range of tactics, from legal cases to direct action, to oppose the construction of the Monument.
1. Proyectos de Rehabilitación Ambiental de Canarias. See https://jmaceytuno.com/
Understanding the lure that Chillida’s Monument exerted over politicians and state officials requires delving into certain processes that were taking place in Spain in the 1990s. After joining the European Economic Community in 1986, the state embarked in an intense period of “modernisation”. Large infrastructures (e.g. the high-speed rail network, airports, new metro and light rail systems, and countless new highways, bridges and tunnels) became the markers of an unequivocal break with the past – that is, with the backward country Franco’s dictatorship had produced.
This was a period characterised by what artist David Bestué1 calls the “monumentalisation of infrastructure” – a phase of technical and budgetary exuberance in which the state’s demand for works of “lasting impact” that would assert the nation’s newfound modernity was met by a group of engineers and architects more than ready to monumentalise public infrastructures, such as Santiago Calatrava or Frank Gehry. Clear and minimalist at times, more often flashy and overconfident, the public works of the time became politico-sensory statements, flagships of Spain’s new democratic, modern condition.2
Within this context, Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance represented, for the region’s politicians, the opportunity to partake in the developmental paroxysm of the time. They regularly referred to the project with expressions such as “a once in a lifetime opportunity”, “a turning point” for the island, or a work of “paramount importance” that “would raise the bar”. It is as if Chillida’s cubic void, the quintessential modernist gesture, created the necessary space for the state’s projections of modernity. The Monument represented not just a new attraction capable of attracting more (and better) tourists, but the very image of a break with the past.
1. Bestué, David. “Formas Libres: La Influencia de La Escultura En La Ingeniería Española Reciente.” El Estado Mental, no. 7 (2015): 132–38.
2. See Larkin, Brian. ‘Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure’. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 175–202. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Larkin, Brian. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’. Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): 327–43.
The hundreds of foot-shaped engravings that decorate Tindaya have played a key role in the controversy. Their discovery triggered the declaration of the mountain as a Cultural Asset, and yet only preliminary archaeological studies have been funded or allowed by the state. Indeed, the engravings aren’t signalled or protected, and have been vandalised.
Archaeologists and activists argue that the engravings indicate Tindaya’s sacredness for the mahos, and as such it represents one of the most – if not the most – precious indigenous site in Fuerteventura.
Archaeologists and activists argue that the engravings indicate Tindaya’s sacredness for the mahos, and as such it represents one of the most – if not the most – precious indigenous site in Fuerteventura.
The current interpretation of the engravings, and of the pre-colonial practices associated to Tindaya at large, highlights the mountain’s centrality for indigenous life and cosmovision. Archaeologist María Antonia Perera speaks of a sacred mountain that acted as the religious epicentre for the mahos, as evidenced by the sheer concentration of foot-shaped engravings, unseen anywhere else in the archipelago, and the mountain’s distinct and commanding presence in the surrounding landscape. Indeed, this type of engravings are also used by Amazigh populations in Northern Africa to sacralise certain spaces and are interpreted as a collective manifestation linked to ritualistic practices.
In the case of Tindaya, Perera and others1 have argued that the fact that 80% of the engravings point towards the West, more specifically to the Winter solstice’s sunset, which takes place precisely before the rain period starts, may be an indication of a shamanic rain ritual. The remains of bones and other organic matter found at the top of the mountain would support such hypothesis. Maho society was largely dependent on these seasonal rains for survival, and their proto-religious practices are well documented in the historical archive. It may be argued that they had developed a technique aimed at introducing an element of predictability in the cycle of the seasons and the life affordances it brings with it, perhaps taming the insecurities associated to the realm beyond experience.2 These strategies are characterised by an embodied continuity between the social, the environment, the cosmic and the spiritual, where being able to tame the future depends on an understanding of the rhythms and relations within which persons are embedded.3
1. Perera Betancort, María Antonia, Juan Antonio Belmonte, Carmen Esteban Esteban, and Antonio Tejera. ‘Tindaya: un estudio arqueoastronómico de la sociedad prehispánica de Fuerteventura’. Tabona: Revista de prehistoria y de arqueología, no. 9 (1996): 165–96.
2. Adam, Barbara, and Chris Groves. Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics. Leiden and Boston: BRILL, 2007.
3. ibid.
One of the distinguishing features of the controversy over Tindaya is that twenty-five years after it was proposed, Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance has neither been built nor abandoned. A combination of the multiple legal challenges initiated by activists and funding difficulties has prevented its construction. But this doesn’t mean that the Monument doesn’t exist. It does in multiple ways: as a promise or a threat, in the form of architectural models, CGI simulations, technical studies, parliamentary debates, and so on. I call this mode of existence “suspension”, meaning an uncertain, in-between state.
In many ways, Tindaya Variations is a film about the strange (a)temporality of the controversy, the fact that everything has changed over these years, and yet nothing has changed.
As Akhil Gupta has argued, suspension “needs to be theorized as its own condition of being. The temporality of suspension is not between past and future, between beginning and end, but constitutes its own ontic condition just as surely as does completion”.1 In other words, the Monument’s suspended state is not a phase prior to its realisation, or following its failure, but rather “one of [its] many possible trajectories”.2
Suspension, in this sense, is a temporal condition of radical uncertainty, that is to say, characterised by a future which is both unknown and unknowable. Crucially, suspension describes an unresolved state that is nonetheless performative, which produces effects and affect. Suspension does not therefore refer to an absence of action; on the contrary, it describes a specific type of performativity connected to uncertainty. A large project such as Chillida’s Monument makes this particularly visible. It is charged with promise and aspiration, and is certainly capable of producing diverse affects and effects (from counter-exhibitions to parliamentary inquiries; from excitement to anger). The actually existing Monument can only be grasped through the multiple relations constructed around it.
1. Gupta, Akhil. ‘Suspension’. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, 24 September 2015.
2. Gupta, Akhil. ‘The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of Infrastructure’. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 62–79. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
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.
The film Tindaya Variations was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant and the Centre for Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. This website was made possible by the generous support of the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Project lead: Isaac Marrero Guillamón
Website design: Lily McCraith
Logo & graphics: Félix Sánchez
CC BY-NC-SA 2019 Isaac Marrero-Guillamón