Initially conceived as a retable installation and later reworked as a film.

Piramidal بيراميدال stages a Catholic procession in southern Spain while an excerpt from Primero sueño (1692) by Juana Inés de la Cruz is heard in voice-over. The poem is transliterated into Arabic script and read aloud by Arabic speakers. Spanish is detached from its habitual Latin alphabet and re-inscribed in another graphic system.

This gesture experiments with aljamiado, a historical practice in which Spanish was written using Arabic characters, particularly among Morisco communities in Al-Andalus. Neither fully legible to monolingual Spanish readers nor to Arabic readers unfamiliar with Spanish phonetics, aljamiado occupies a space of opacity. It suggests language as coded survival, as parallel inscription.

The altered script produces shifts in rhythm, pronunciation and comprehension, unsettling the assumed correspondence between language, alphabet and territory.

Filmed during Holy Week in Andalusia, the work engages the baroque intensity of Catholic ritual. For the artist, these nocturnal processions were once part of childhood experience, marked by fascination and ambivalence. Rather than restoring faith or reenacting devotion, Piramidal بيراميدال lingers in the shadows of that spectacle, where echoes of suppressed or forgotten languages remain audible.

By crossing Andalusia and Mexico, ritual and baroque poetry, Piramidal بيراميدال foregrounds language as sediment, shaped by conquest, conversion and migration. Spanish, in its imperial expansion, carries within it traces of other cosmologies and linguistic encounters. Script becomes architecture; voice becomes displacement.