Toj Óolal - A Game of Relational Thinking
Interactive installation in collaboration with Suumil Móoktaan Collective and Renee Bonte  

Exhibition Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills

Casco Art Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands

28 May - 10 July 2022

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A lonely farmhouse standing in a pit surrounded by high-end residential buildings.

A farmer with no land roams around in different spaces with her animals.

Farmland traditions, knowledge and memories are disappearing before our eyes.

Toj Óolal is a Mayan concept, which means, to be a healthy person is to stand well in a healthy land in relationality. A person cannot live without the community.

A farm cannot exist without the soil, the river, the insects nor the relations that build up this farming practice. Listening to and learning from Mayan communities who are living in close relation with land and are practicing ancestral knowledges, help us weave back the relationality that has been disrupted in this context.

How to preserve farmland beyond the historical buildings by re-membering the relations with land as Earth knowledges and skills?

We propose the Toj Óolal game to root our thinking in relationality among all the inseparable elements, by igniting conversation on how to sustain life a living territory. In this game, instead of competing against each other, all players work together to reach a common goal. And instead of farming to harvest the crops into commodities, our goal is to celebrate life by taking care of all relations.