Casa Polanco honours the xoloitzcuintli in contemporary Día de Muertos installation
A new work at the Mexico City venue brings together the craftsmanship of BARÓN & VICARIO and designer Raúl de la Cerda to explore the ancient bond between the sacred dog and the souls it guided to the afterlife.
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The xoloitzcuintli, Mexico’s ancient hairless dog, held profound spiritual significance in Mexica cosmology. These creatures were believed to guide souls through Mictlán, the underworld, shepherding the departed through their passage into another existence. That timeless bond forms the conceptual core of La Muerte como Tránsito, a new installation at Casa Polanco that draws on centuries of indigenous wisdom to create something urgently contemporary.
The work emerges from a collaboration between BARÓN & VICARIO, the celebrated Mexico City atelier known for its meticulous craftsmanship, and designer Raúl de la Cerda, whose practice moves fluidly between material culture and spiritual inquiry. Together they have constructed an installation that functions as both artistic meditation and cultural conversation, honouring Día de Muertos not through tourist aesthetics but through genuine engagement with the philosophy that underpins the tradition. Death, in this framing, becomes not an ending but a transition, a threshold where connection endures.
Casa Polanco, positioned as both restaurant and cultural space in Mexico City’s Polanco neighbourhood, has become known for programming that marries gastronomic excellence with artistic vision. This installation continues that trajectory, transforming the venue into something resembling a gallery or chapel, a place where the architectural and the spiritual intersect. The work carries weight precisely because it refuses sentimentality. Instead, it grounds itself in the material: the hands that shaped it, the design decisions that give it form, the spaces it occupies.
The installation invites visitors to consider how memory functions, how proximity to those we have lost might manifest not in despair but in ritual, in craft, in the spaces we create together. It suggests that the bonds we form do indeed travel beyond a lifetime, moving through time and culture with a gravity that no distance can diminish.
Casa Polanco remains in Mexico City’s Polanco district.
Imagery courtesy of Casa Polanco (@casa_polanco).