Day of the Dead 2024

A: The Day of the Dead is a day in the year when we celebrate the visiting of our dead. It is a day when we all believe in the same thing, at the same time: the reunion of life and death is possible. And in a world where it is so hard to believe in something, to believe in this bridge, to make it a ritual, to dedicate time and space to it within our hearts, is something that makes us more human.

A:  I thought of honoring what I love about Mexico: its colors, its flowers, its animals, its festive spirit and above all its unflagging joy. I thought of honoring and celebrating my dead with what I love to do most: drawing.

A: The inspiration for this drawing came from many places in unison, but mainly from two elements: the cempasúchiles the flower that the Mexica had as a symbol of the sun, and since then was an offering for their dead, and the tlalchichis and xoloizcuintles dogs, or the pre-hispanic representation of them they guided their owners on the way to Mictlán (the place where the souls of the dead go according to Mexica mythology), which is the belief that gives origin to the current Day of the Dead tradition. Clay figures of these dogs have been found buried in shaft tombs in the west of the country (specially in Colima, the place where I was born) as symbolic offerings for the deceased.

A: I feel fortunate to belong to a culture whose mixture of worldviews has resulted in the understanding and internalization that death does not end with life. Mexico is a place in the world where death is as celebrated as life; it is a place full of contradictions, and as luck would have it is so, because it is in the inhabiting of contradictions that we grow, where we stretch our space of being.