FERVOR, by Juan Brenner (b. 1977, Guatemala City), is a photographic essay that explores desire as a vital force in the Guatemalan highlands—a region shaped by historical violence and complex dynamics of power that permeate bodies and daily practices. This exhibition, presented by Sorondo Projects in collaboration with Eros Publishing, brings together a selection of images from the book FERVOR, showcased for the first time across various media: photographs on paper and on fabric, alongside panels that reveal the research process, visual references, and editorial work behind the project.

Throughout this essay, Brenner poetically captures how devotional practices, everyday life, and digital culture intertwine, using the figure of San Simón to reflect on resistance and transformation. San Simón, an enigmatic mediator between the sacred and the profane, embodies the tensions and possibilities born from these intersections. His adaptability—building bridges between ancestral rituals and contemporary technologies— challenges hegemonic narratives and reveals new ways of understanding identity and power.

San Simón is not the typical saint, nor the icon you might expect to find on a family altar. He sports custom cowboy boots, clutches a Coca-Cola, and lights a Marlboro; his rituals have become a trend on TikTok, and his cult is a refuge for migrants, punks, queer folks, and restless souls traversing the highland mountains in search of meaning and community. Brenner’s photographs distill the fierce fusion of Maya spirituality and contemporary aesthetics, revealing how radical devotion becomes a collective vital force and responds to the need to generate new forms of belonging.

Two centuries after its first Constitution, Guatemala continues to write and rewrite its pacts between the visible and the invisible, between law and desire, faith and the resistance of those inhabiting the margins. San Simón's presence radiates from street processions to WhatsApp stickers, spilling over what is “folkloric” and staking its place within contemporary visual languages. This is resistance in motion, expressed with undeniable style and a generative pop sensibility.

The power of FERVOR lies in its documentation of this syncretism and in the generative energy of twenty-first century identity. Brenner’s lens insists that spiritual life is also technological life, that deep culture is perpetually being remixed and negotiated. The images reveal individuals who combine tz’utujil textiles with gold teeth, tattoos, and contemporary fashion—demonstrating that identities multiply and interweave: to be Maya today does not exclude being digitally native, punk, feminist, spiritual, and queer, all at once.

The exhibition at Sorondo Projects underscores the importance of creating spaces for contemplation rooted in respect—spaces where communities themselves can tell their own stories and initiate dialogue from their own perspective. The offerings of Coca-Cola, liquor, and cigarettes affirm San Simón as a pragmatic and inclusive presence, able to listen, adapt, and persist in the present.

Guided by an ethic of encounter and reciprocity, FERVOR finds in photography a vehicle for collaborative storytelling. Brenner’s gaze resists appropriation, becoming a shared territory in which each subject is an active participant in both showing and being seen. The exhibition invites us to look and to listen, to recognize the collective power of those who—even in the face of adversity—continue to reinvent their ways of life and celebration.

FERVOR offers a renewed vision of popular spirituality, collectivity, and belonging, where beauty and desire persevere as acts of resistance and vitality. Within the fractures of history, Brenner finds continuity: a living pulse, insistent on creation, connection, and the ongoing invention of new ways of being. And from Sorondo Projects, we celebrate being part of this process, offering a space for communities to become protagonists of their own transformation and to set the stage for the vital dialogues of the present.