All cities contain within them those that preceded them.
One can try to trace them through their vestiges, but it is almost always an exercise reserved for the pleasure of the imagination.
That's what technical artist Thomas Kole (Zeist, Netherlands, 29 years old) was doing, virtually walking through the streets of Mexico City, when he realized that nothing he observed was ever going to be enough to rebuild that other city. buried under today's: the great Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire.
Far from abandoning his efforts, he gave himself completely to it and a year and a half later he has presented the most faithful 3D reconstruction known of the ancient metropolis.
Without leaving home, Kole crossed the Atlantic into the past and landed, with the help of technology, in the America of 1518, the culminating moment before the Spanish conquest.
Digital reconstruction of the Sacred Precinct that contains the Great Temple, in the epicenter of the city.Thomas Kole
“It was totally unexplored territory for me.
I don't even know how I found the topic, there is no catalyst.
But I think once you read something about it, you're hooked.
The idea settled in my head and it was impossible to get it out,” says the artist.
Despite dedicating himself to programming, history has always intrigued him, and a couple of clicks browsing here and there led to a project that crystallized his fascination.
“Tenochtitlan surprised me in many aspects: its size, its organization, its structure.
Very beautiful things have been written about her.
Its natural condition, on a lake and surrounded by volcanic mountains, really summons the imagination,” he reasons.
Kole had never traveled to Mexico until this week.
He doesn't speak Spanish either.
But his obsession resonates with the verses that the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal—also a foreigner and trapped, like him, in the beauty of that city on the lake—wrote many decades ago: “But how to write the hieroglyph again, / paint the jaguar again, overthrow the tyrants?
/ Rebuild our tropical acropolises again, / our rural capitals surrounded by cornfields?”
Answering these questions almost literally, as Kole proposed, required large doses of documentation and an effort to get rid of the preconceived ideas that filter, in his opinion, into an education and archives in which the European perspective prevails.
Kole, on his computer in front of an image in which the two largest volcanoes in the valley appear in the background.Marc Driessen
For a year and a half, he combined the development of this project, carried out at his home in Amersfoort during his free time, with his work for a company that develops installations and interactive games for museums and other places.
His history and knowledge of video games combined to keep the project within manageable parameters: “Games need to be fast, optimization is very important, so I used many of his tricks.
There is a lot of sense of detail that only works at drone distance.
“If you get closer, it looks like an impressionist painting.”
Each element that appears in the project had at least five versions prior to the final one.
The result is an impressive journey through time.
The Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes crown from the background a landscape that is rarely visible from the city due to pollution.
The extinct sacred precinct, returned to its original state along with its imposing Main Temple - the most difficult part for Kole due to its symbolic value and its centrality - captures the gaze of a city built around it with rectangular plots that reveal the hierarchies. of the time.
The 200,000 inhabitants of the metropolis were divided into neighborhoods that had their own markets, schools and workshops, in the style of the colonies of the current city.
Like little ants on the ground, one can see them with their shopping baskets and cotton clothes, strolling through the streets of this reconstructed empire.
“Dividing it into grids makes sense when you're on the water, because you need to actively create the terrain, you can't stick a stick and draw a line on the sand,” says Kole, who remains doubtful about the placement of some elements.
“I'm still trying to figure out why some streets are arranged in a completely random direction.
I think it could be due to the impact of the natural flow of water, which is very difficult to redirect, but I am not sure,” he speculates.
Digital reconstruction of the Templo Mayor at dawn.
Thomas Kole
His doubts add to those of the experts.
He thought that his job would be to translate some old map about which there was some consensus into virtual reality, but that map does not exist.
“I soon realized that no one agrees on anything,” he summarizes.
So, despite the archaeological and historical sources and the multitude of plans, the greatest weight fell on direct consultations with specialists, to whom he showed his proposals.
“If someone did the reconstruction in 10 years, it would surely be different because there will be new information,” he acknowledges.
Kole wanted to involve the Mexican people in some way, and to do so he contacted several collaborators, always electronically, just like this interview, conducted from Mexico.
The three local artists who collaborated with him were in charge of photographing the current state of the city —Andrés Semo García—;
of creating the Tenochtitlan glyph that inaugurates the website—Chicome Itzcuintli Amatlapalli (My Mexica Heart)—;
and to translate the descriptions that accompany the images from English to Spanish and the main variant of Nahuatl, the largest indigenous language of Mexico -Rodrigo Ortega Acoltzi-.
“I was surprised how, when translated, some paragraphs were half as long, because Nahuatl is very efficient for talking about certain things, and others were twice as long, because it was totally inefficient,” he says.
Of this ancient but new language for him, he is especially attracted to the prefix
po
, which means smoke, and which “returns in many ways”: Popocatépetl, chipotle,...
His friends and coworkers find it funny that “a random guy” from the Netherlands “did something like that,” although for him, the connection between Nahuatl and Dutch is much closer than it seems and is present in many everyday words, such as tomato or avocado.
This project was born out of pure inspiration and he doesn't know when or what the next one will be, nor what country or era it will take him to.
For the moment, his goal is to present his project this Friday, for the first time, in the city that today contains the city that moved him and that continues to build bridges between the two sides of the Atlantic.
That other foreigner in love with Mexico and with the last name Cardenal already said it, “Tenochtitlan is there, even without adobes.
/ Still turned into a network of holes.
/ It remains in the vision of its poets.”
Also in that of those who awaken it from lethargy.
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