Marfa – Texas. What did I do here? I am not from here and tried to read the land as a compass, by mapping shadows during day-and moonlight. During daylight the conscious and disciplinary way of measuring shadows didn’t allow a mirage to reveal. Moonlight worked differently. What did I long for by this rather silly activity? How to honour all those histories which came here earlier? 

Can I ever imagine what this land meant for those who came here before me?  What do I call those places? Crime Scenes of History? Monuments? Ruins? A place for commemoration and honour or revenge? Is this landscape a ruin by holding “two opposing tendencies of ruination and edification, of life and death”? (Sadek) Or do I name them just by their former function I can read information about: 

‘The hospital building of the Army Camp in Marfa, Texas, during sunlight’ ….

“The Spring Camp in the National Park Guadalupe Mountain where the ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ defeated the last Apache stronghold in Texas, during moonlight…”?

Or simply as places where the moon and the sun met my line… where the fleeting nature of the illuminating shadow was signalled…

Anneke Ingwersen, November 2014