©Maryse Boyse

A lecture-workshop by Indigenous artist Tiziano Cruz, from the Quechua and Aymara communities of South America, bringing together art, territory, memory, community, and Andean cosmology through the practice of making bread offerings for the deceased.
Tiziano shares a practice rooted in childhood and community.

The activity unfolds in three stages. First, participants prepare the bread dough following a traditional recipe from the artist’s community. Then, the lecture offers a historical exploration of rituals surrounding life and death in Latin America, placing Indigenous practices that predate colonization in dialogue with the transformations brought about by the conquest and subsequent religious syncretism. Finally, an intimate moment invites each participant to remember someone who has died and create a bread figure in their memory, allowing them to take the ritual into their own homes.
The historical journey begins with the ancestral practices of Indigenous peoples and their understanding of the relationship between the earthly world and the ancestral realm. The work addresses the place of the Malquis—the deceased—the mountains or Apus as spaces of rest and connection with the ancestors, and the role of different objects and rituals in sustaining community life.
With colonization, these practices were persecuted and transformed. Tiziano explores how the prohibition of Indigenous rituals led to processes of syncretism, in which traditional elements became intertwined with Catholic symbols and practices. It is within this context that bread offerings emerged as a new way of keeping the relationship with the dead alive.
The encounter explores the different forms these offerings take throughout Latin America: from Mexico’s Pan de Muertos to the Tanta'wawas of Peru and Bolivia, and the traditional figures of northern Chile and Argentina, such as the Tanta'escalera, the Tanta'cruz or Chakana, and the Tanta'paloma. Each figure carries a meaning and function as a bridge between different planes of existence: Hanan Pacha (the upper or celestial world), Kay Pacha (the earthly or present world), and Uku Pacha (the lower or underground world). An Andean Trilogy representing balance and interconnectedness of all life.
Bread becomes an artistic material, food, memory, and offering, allowing to sense death not as a definitive disappearance, but as a relationship that continues between the living, the dead, the territory, and the community. The ritual allows people who have migrated, to return to their towns and mountains to symbolically reunite with their deceased loved ones.

This experience is a participatory performance-lecture that recovers the collective making of bread ancestral Andean memory, reflecting on colonization and cultural syncretism, reclaiming ingIndigenous ways of living life, death, territory and community, transforming a familiar practice into an act of memory, resistance, and collective encounter.