Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1490572
All of this is where I started with building the ancestral history of the Talokanil. Using Critical Fabulation (a term coined by Saidiya Hartman, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University), which is a combining of historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative to fill in the blanks left in the historical record. For the Talokanil, the design team documented their migration from Palenque in 900 CE to the Yucatan coastal port city of Tulum after the Great Drought. We created a record of their architectural development underwater over a 300-year span, and how the memory influenced their culture as it changed and evolved over time, generation after generation, to create what we now know as Talokan. Memory as form is in essence the translation of emotions. Talokan is Namor's memorial of the world he once knew at the end of its reign. The greatness he knew of Maya was from oral stories and written records and manuscripts such as the Codices and the Popol Vuh. Through Namor's quest in memorializing Maya, the originality of Talokan became material. The architecture of Talokan is the physicality of memory, which lies in the gestures the structures adopted, while also managing the provocation of thought about the life and purpose of the structure itself, and care over the architectural spectacle. F. NAMOR'S THRONE ROOM EXTERIOR. PRODUCTION STILL. G. NAMOR'S THRONE ROOM. SET PHOTO. H. NAMOR'S THRONE ROOM BACKDROP. DIGITAL MODEL BY PETER RUBIN. F G H