Giovanna Miralles

Giovanna Miralles is a Bolivian artist, researcher, and Maya ceremonial practitioner (Ajq’ij). In the 1990s, she lived for three years with Maya communities in Guatemala, where she was initiated into ceremonial practice. Her work bridges ritual, performance, and anthropology, drawing on both Maya cosmology and the Andean traditions of her native Bolivia. Through ceremonies, installations, and participatory projects, she explores how Indigenous knowledge and ritual can be reimagined within contemporary art.

The Maya Ceremony to call for the Sun has taken place throughout centuries in Mesoamerica. Its origin is written in the Popol Wuj when the first four heads of the K’iche patrilineages, Balam Ki’tze’, Balam Aq’ab, Majuk’utaj and Ik’ibalam (Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Mahucutah, and True Jaguar), came ‘from where the Sun rises’ and lit the first ceremony of fire to call for the sun when everything was dark and wet. The meaning of the fire ceremony in the Maya World has not changed as it has been maintained and practiced in the K’iche oral tradition. The Maya ceremony is renewal, hope and a calling for humanity’s union:
‘That the sun rises, that the dawn comes, that nobody is left behind, that everybody advances together like the fingers of a
hand.’
The count of the days follows the sacred 260-day Maya Cholq’ij calendar, where every day is owned by a Nawal. The Nawales are the Lady/Lord bearers that are greeted when the sun rises, represented in the calendar as personages who are in movement, metaphorically described as carrying the time on their backs.
The transcendence of time is of vital importance in Maya cosmology, paraphrasing Guzmán Böckler: For the Maya people time is a rational construction with a significant aesthetic which encompasses a religion of infinite values. The construction of time has allowed the Maya to keep themselves and their culture alive, despite being subjected to brutal and inhuman conditions.

Performance ‘When the night ends

An interpretation of the Maya Sacred calendar Cholq’ij through a performance which reinterprets the sacred ceremony of fire, with the production of a scroll with the days’ count, an offering built with flowers instead of fire and candles, which will remain in exhibition until the end of the festival and a projection of the sacred fire with an original soundtrack. Through the ceremony time will be represented as winding and unravelling, within a rhythmical cycle of movement and stillness.