Objects For Remembering

You are invited into Casa Onora in San Miguel Chapultepec, a living house where contemporary design and ancestral craftsmanship are placed in dialogue. Each room is arranged as lived context, allowing objects to be encountered through their everyday use, symbolism, and ritual function. This private visit focuses on crafts connected to Día de Muertos and the ways Mexicans honor ancestors through memory, offering, and return. You examine calaveras from Xalitla, Guerrero, using them to trace the festival’s pre-Hispanic cosmologies and its later syncretism with Catholic observances. The conversation turns to the structure of the ofrenda — its tiers, foods, flowers, photographs, and papel picado — and to the regional variations that shape how communities sustain this living tradition today. An artisanal drink and snack are offered during the visit, extending the hospitality of the house and reinforcing its character as a lived setting rather than a showroom.

This curated visit invites you to slow down and consider how ritual and craft intersect within domestic life in Mexico. Lorena and her colleagues work in long-term, horizontal partnerships with more than 500 artisans from 183 communities across 28 Mexican states — relationships built on respect, transparency, and shared creativity. UNESCO inscribed Mexico’s Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead on its heritage list in 2008. Rather than presenting Day of the Dead as spectacle, which is what most visitors see, and understandably so, given how colorful and immersive it is, this experience is offered year-round, and situates the culture and traditions of the festival within craft, continuity and care. Calaveras, ceramic skulls, and ofrenda elements are discussed both as vessels of memory, shaped by local belief and family practice, as well as artistic objects of exceptional craft. You gain a grounded understanding of how these ritual objects carry meaning beyond the festival itself.

Lorena de la Piedra studied sociology and textile art and is a weaver herself, but what really defines her work is time spent alongside artisans. Since 2013, she has been working directly with makers, learning through shared processes, conversations, and everyday practice. After living in Oaxaca for eight years and working at the Textile Museum of Oaxaca, she developed a deep connection to the region’s textile traditions and the communities who sustain them. She invites visitors to slow down, get their hands involved, and experience craft from the inside. Whether through textiles or ceramics, the focus is on learning directly from artisans – understanding materials, techniques, and the stories behind them. Each experience is designed as a space for exchange, curiosity, and meaningful connection. Her colleagues at Onora collaborate with artisans from across the country to create contemporary textiles and objects, using traditional techniques that reflect their cultural identity.

There is nothing specific you need to bring. Should you wish to acquire one of the artisanal pieces available at Casa Onora, both cash and card are accepted - though there is no obligation to purchase.