I spent twenty days in Mexico, traveling through the south and center of the country, from the Yucatán Peninsula to the capital. A bumpy itinerary, dotted with ruins and supermarkets, towns crisscrossed by a tangle of power lines, timeless neighborhoods, markets where the fruit takes on improbable shapes and the hanging chickens look like rags.
From Cancún to Valladolid, then Mérida, Palenque, San Cristóbal, and finally Mexico City. Before leaving, I knew little about this distant country. I only had two phrases with me, two talismans I found almost by chance in a book by Pino Cacucci, The Dust of Mexico, shortly before traveling. The first one read:
"When the sun disappears behind the mountains, the dust in the streets takes on a golden color."
Only at the end of the trip, upon arriving in Mexico City, did I realize that my entire journey had been a gradient: a slow immersion in the dust that turns into ink, or perhaps in the color that remains when everything settles. Because in Mexico, color doesn't seem to come from light, it doesn't fall from above like in Renaissance frescoes, it isn't born from refractions or optical illusions. Here, color rises from the earth, from substance itself. It's something you touch, you step on, it enters your nose, and you breathe.
Walking through the archaeological site of Ek Balam, among time-worn stones, I understood that pre-Columbian cultures had a deep understanding of the living substance of color. Their history is written in the materials and pigments they used: Mayan blue was a mixture of indigo and clay, kneaded, fired, and then ground. Red came from cochineal, a tiny insect collected by hand from prickly pear cactus, dried, and crushed. Black was ash from resinous woods or soot mixed with animal fat. Yellow was extracted from marigold or pericón flowers: dried, reduced to fragments, and rubbed until they vanished. Even green, unstable and capricious, was achieved by grinding oxidized copper or stones into a fine, flour-like powder. Each pigment had a material genealogy; each hue, a corporeal origin. Matter and pigment, inseparable once again, where the latter is never just image: It has weight, smell and depth. In Mayan or Mexica culture, painting a wall, a mask, or a figure didn't mean imitating their appearance but activating it. It wasn't about adorning, but rather giving a real presence, leaving a mark. Therefore, color here becomes an embodied, earthly, often organic experience. Painting, in fact, was a ritual gesture, not an aesthetic one.
Upon arriving in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, color changes in nature but not in essence. Until then, I had perceived it in peeling walls, in fabrics hanging in the sun, in fruits displayed as offerings in the markets. But it was only in the compact darkness of a temazcal that color became a full experience. The temazcal is a traditional Mesoamerican construction used for steam bath rituals. Inside, the steam generated by hot stones and water creates a purifying environment that connects with the earth and allows for bodily and spiritual rebirth. You enter by bending through a low, curved door, similar to a maternal womb, and you advance as if in reverse childbirth: not toward the light, but inward, toward the ground. The world remains outside. Inside, only darkness and steam. It's not about seeing, but about immersing yourself. 
In the center of the hut, like a buried heart, a pile of incandescent volcanic rocks, which the shaman calls "abuelitas," slowly accumulates. Alive, arrived from the center of the earth, charged with memory. When the door closes and everything plunges into darkness, their red is the only visible color. It is a mineral and archaic hue, a red that doesn't illuminate, but burns. It vibrates on the skin and stirs the blood. When the shaman throws water over the stones, the steam that rises like a sigh envelops everything, transforms into heat, and turns the red into something more corporeal and profound. In the temazcal, the red of the abuelitas —the shaman explains to us—is an invitation to descend into our interior. There, I understood that here, spirituality is not ethereal, neither escape nor elevation, but a return to the earth, to the body and dust. Thus, the spiritual also takes shape through what can be touched, smelled, and seen. The sacred is not what is elevated, but what remains. Even on the Day of the Dead, in Mexico, prayer coexists with the preparation of the table for those who have departed, and food, cigarettes, tequila, and coffee are offered. The orange flowers, the marigolds , are not an abstract tribute, but a traced, fragrant path that the dead must be able to follow. They do not celebrate the end, but continuity. They do not ask for silence, but rather call for life. 
At the end of the trip, already in Mexico City, as I walked at night along Avenida Bucareli, where the buildings resemble sleeping bodies breathing slowly, I had the impression that every wall, every stall, every awning was a living repository of chromatic history. Layers of tones, never smoothed, never clean or neutral, all sedimented in time.
Mexico doesn't erase, it accumulates. And in color, the memory of the soil surfaces. The ochre of volcanic rock, the pink of quicklime, the blacks of soot, the yellows burned by the sun. Colors that don't want to please, but to linger. Like wounds. Like memories. Like embers. This, perhaps, is the most radical visual and theological lesson that Mexico has taught me: that there is no separation between above and below, between spirit and matter. Even the sacred here is earthly. There's a Mesoamerican saying that goes, "Paradise is not above us. It's beneath our feet." It's not a heavenly promise of elevation but an earthly fact. Thus, meaning is not found beyond life, but within its framework. Between the folds of flesh, of matter, of dust. In Mexico, one doesn't wait, one inhabits and remains. A country made of sounds, smells, stones, and flavors, where color bears witness. It's not adornment or appearance but a repository and inheritance. And perhaps that's why, as that second phrase I carried with me said—
