Mariana Castillo Deball developed Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time? in collaboration with the Coatlicue Ceramics Workshop (led by the Martínez Alarzón family) of the village of Atzompa, Oaxaca, and the ceramics cooperative Inovando la Tradición, a creative platform in which artisans, design-ers, and artists honor and adapt the ceramic traditions of the state of Oaxaca. The project was originally commissioned for Castillo Deball's exhibition of the same title at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO).

In preparation for making the work, the group visited the Museo Rufino Tamayo de Arte Prehispánico in Oaxaca City, which opened in 1974 as Tamayo's gift to his home city. In the exhibition spaces, which he developed with museog-rapher Fernando Gamboa, the pre-Hispanic ceramics are not displayed in the conventional way—as relics organized in chronological order-but according to aesthetic considerations. After selecting their favorite pieces as inspiration, the workshop group discussed Atzompa potters' relationship with their own heritage, which led to a consideration of originality, copy, forgery, and the evolution of style as seen in Mexican archaeological findings. The workshop ended with the expression of answers, in ceramic form, to the questions of how to tell the story of the universe in a hundred years and in a single day.
For this stage, the group split into two, each developing and rendering their own account in the form of clay objects assembled in totemic columns in the manner of a corps exquis. The column acts as a narrative device that resignifies the objects that form it and, in so doing, dismantles old narratives and allows for the construction of new histories.

SITElines presents three of the seven columns: one that resembles a pochote (Ceiba Aesculifolia), a thorned tree sacred in Oaxaca; another made of ceramic gear wheels, articulating a fusion of tradition and modernity; and a third that mixes various ceramics figures, including a bat, a dog, a warrior, a man, a gear, a pochote trunk, and Mother Earth, which when assembled tell the story of the universe.

- Pablo León de la Barra