Maya is a trickier neighbor. In Sanskrit, maya is illusion; in many places, Maya is also a name, a mother, an artist. The optical trick of video is that it shows us “as if” — a staged scene, a reassembled memory, a digital reconstruction. But Maya the person reminds us that illusion is not merely deception; it is how culture holds meaning. In a gallery, a video can be formally honest about its artifice or slyly stealth about its manipulations. The paradox of video is that its realism — the hum of actual time, the stutter of a breathing actor — makes its constructedness all the more persuasive. Maya’s presence in the column suggests that what we see is always a blend of truth and fabrication: a testimony shaped by framing and a history re-edited.