In Mayan Kaqchikel, Oyonïk is a healing ritual for people who are lost, both physically missing or spiritually adrift. According to Kaqchikel culture, one becomes lost when the body is separated from the spirit. Oyonïk calls on the heart of the sky and the heart of the earth to ask for a person’s spirit to return to their body, so they might be found again. This ritual is also used to communicate with individuals, who are far away and can receive messages through dreams and signs that manifest themselves through nature and animals. As such, Oyonïk is both a healing ritual and a communications technology.
Édgar Calel’s (b. 1987 in Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa); lives and works in Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa)) Oyonïk (The Calling)(2022) is comprised of clay pots filled with water, rose petals, and tree branches, as well as paintings and drawings of ceramic pottery shards that were found buried in the earth on the artist’s family’s land. Through conversations with his father, Calel has come to believe the shards were intentionally broken and buried by their ancestors, as an act of cultural preservation to prevent colonizers from seizing objects and the cultural knowledge manifest in them. The artist works from a counter-ethnographic perspective, thinking through archeology from the point of view of the people who live with these objects and histories “under their feet.”
