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Fable for a Dancing Death

This series of fifteen photographs is part of a long-term project focused on the muerteadas of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico, a ritual celebration of the Day of the Dead experienced as an all-night festivity where music, disguise, dance, and mezcal open a threshold between life and death.

The celebration functions as a collective ritual of catharsis and healing, in which the community transforms mourning into celebration. Bodies overflow, identities shift, and death—embodied through masks and ritual characters—appears to dance among the living. In this popular frenzy, the grotesque, the playful, and the sacred merge into a single experience.

Rather than documenting a tradition, these photographs seek to evoke a fable: a lived narrative in which dance and popular theatricality reveal a darker, vital, and deeply human dimension. This body of work is grounded in the tradition of photographing ritual and pagan Day of the Dead festivities in Mexico, where the image preserves the trace of an intensity that fades with the arrival of dawn.

All the photographs in this series are analog images, made over several years of sustained work within this celebration.