Author: Daniel Hojnacki

For a brief moment I wanted to playfully yet systematically create parameters for myself in the landscape. I constructed vestiges of my moving body using vinyl flagging tape to map the temporary artificial boundary I placed myself within. Curious of what the natural environment would look like as a briefly constructed form, I used the spaces between branches, trunks of trees, the bottom of the arroyo to it’s top and the stones buried in it’s basin. I wanted to, if only for a moment, demarcate my passage, revealing it through my mark making with the graphic vinyl tape. I then dismantled and left the space to document the seemingly absent and erased trace of my past self. I was curious as to what the visibility of subtle distance may have been between the growth of two trees , between a stone or to the top of an eroding arroyo, making apparent the scale of a natural space through feeble and inconsequential attempts of mapping my movement through the landscape. These constructions were like minimal drawing exercises to try and reveal unseen distances I climbed or walked within these moments of occupying a space.

My interest in using vinyl flagging tape comes from seeing it left about in the landscape. Used as trail markers, and by land surveyors to mark a point of measurement, as well as in other forms of demarcating boundary lines. These pieces of vinyl tape left by someone are often used to help guide another through a particular area, to assist in their orientation. They read to me like small messages, seemingly unimportant, but may hold some meaning to the unknown person’s profession, a small trace of conversation from one to another in the land. I find myself photographing them often when I am hiking, biking, etc.

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The body and the boundaries are not so static 
They shimmer and move, chatter with rusted steel touch
Sticking their heads out from beneath the dirt and dust you’ve been kicking over them
Someone is looking out for you out there 
Another body
Always was another body before yours
That touched these bleached bounds
The same as your white bones 
Of air encased in numerous unknown formations awaiting repair
Can you stitch a breath of forgetfulness together?
The same as you and your body, bounded by your own memory 
Limited, has corners, you turn and re-orient, get frustrated
Possessing your space 
Positioned in the presence of permeating persistent memory
 

Can you own the stone below that which bounds it?
If they were to teach one another to talk to each other 
Would you listen then? 

Thank you stranger for orienting me in this space
Although I may still feel lost, at least I know where I am now 
Sometimes

It was ambiguous they said when defining the Elena Gallegos grant for they didn’t know what “sierra” meant. It wasnt until many years later when re measuring the bounds of the tract of land did they find out it actually meant the crest of the Sandias. And that was a long way from where the fence line landed that day. Or the days before and the ones before that. It’s said it still looks much the way it did in 1679, but does it feel the same? Does it speak the same dialect or language it once did? There are claims that hidden off a trail in the Sandia Mountain lies buried a stone with a deep cross etched within it representing the boundary marker left by a Spanish lieutenant marking the boundary of the Sandia Pueblo from the late 1700’s. Buried. That would have meant somewhere up to almost 10,000 acres, an area of about 15 square miles well into the mountains of the Sandias. When you look out from the sierra today, you can see the defined line of the Pueblo butting no further up to the foothills across the arid dry valley. A headstone of the past dictating what was once and is no longer, an epitaph more than a boundary. Laid to rest. If we taught this stone to talk, if only we taught them words, what could we learn from them today? Vaguely, always vaguely remembered, it’s amazing how memory can play that cruel trick on the mind of forgetfulness at the most timely of times. Or maybe we choose to forget and let interpretation take place for history. Who atones for their sins? Is it the hang gliders, the icarus climbing toward the sun, maybe to take that too with them on their way down? Is there a boundary etched in the stars? Is it truly too late to redraw the bounds that bind us, too late to atone for those sins?