(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Welcome to the Petty Stamps Distinguished Speaker series.

(upbeat music) (audience clapping) - Welcome to the Petty Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

Today we present product designer and sustainable materialist, Fernando Laposse here direct from Mexico City.

Today's event is presented with support from Design Core Detroit and series partners, arts Initiative, Detroit PBS, PBS Books, WNET's All Arts, and Michigan Public 91.7 FM.

Design Core Detroit.

I don't know if many of you may already know of their great work in the city and beyond.

For those of you who don't, Design Core Detroit's primary mission is to support the success of creative businesses and people in the Detroit region.

In the coming year, close upon us, 2025 Design Core will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of Detroit's UNESCO City of Design designation.

Now, this is a big deal because Detroit is the only city in the United States with this distinction, and Design Core is proud to steward this UNESCO relationship.

More recently, Design Core, some of you may know hosted various student teams for the UNESCO Street Design Challenge.

And happy to say You of Them's team received honors in the concept category, so go blue.

And students, student art exhibition, open call, if you haven't seen it, the U of M Arts initiative.

One of our other great partners is seeking student artwork for a juried art exhibition on the theme of Take Care.

So your artwork should engage with the theme, Take care, can be about caring for oneself, community healing, or taking care as self-expression, and how it can help the world we all want to live in.

So those submissions are open to all undergraduate and graduate students.

Submissions close this coming Monday, November 18th.

You can find more information in how to submit your proposal on the Arts initiative website, arts@michigan.umich.edu Reminder to silence your cell phones.

We will have a Q and A today following Fernando's talk.

Here you'll see there's microphones at the ends of the two aisles, so please do when the moment arises, when he'll invite you down and we'll have some time to answer a few of your questions.

And now for a proper introduction of our guest today, we have with us a Design Core Detroit team member who also just happens to be a Stamp school alum.

So yes, there is hope of making it out successfully into the world students, please welcome Kevin Gilboe.

(audience clapping) - Good evening, everybody.

Yes, I'm proof that there is life after college at the University of Michigan studying art and design.

And it's been interesting to go here around the world to 26 countries living abroad in Tokyo and now back here in this very interesting place with all of you tonight.

But I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to introduce a very special guest here.

And I think to a way into the content that we'll be looking at tonight, is to think about how issues of environmental decline, loss of biodiversity, community breakdown, and the negative impacts of globalization, touch all of us regardless of perspectives, geographies, or cultures.

And while these topics are really huge, it's often easy to miss the stories of individual people and communities and what they have to teach us as they find their way forward in a changing world.

And so, Fernando Laposse is an artist who draws inspiration from the wisdom of indigenous communities, deep cultural context, and the potential of materials that are often overlooked in the creative process.

One of the things I think is really interesting about his work is that he's not continuing on the crafts that are already in place within a given community.

He's really looking at everything from a fresh perspective, looking at materials in a whole sense, and developing new techniques from scratch, which then he can contribute back as part of the legacy of that community.

A son of Mexico, Fernando, is a global inspiration for the untapped potential that materials and communities can have.

His work helps to create jobs, uplift communities, and have been internationally recognized in many prestigious places such as the Trienalli de Milano, the Cooper Hewitt, the Design Museum in London, and the World Economic Forum.

So Fernando is joining us all the way from Mexico City, which definitely has better weather than here right now.

And I'd like all of you to like to invite all of you to join me in a very Michigan welcome to Fernando Laposse.

(audience cheering) - Hello everyone.

Thank you for coming.

Glad to be here.

I'm Fernando Designer from Mexico City.

It's a real pleasure being here, especially seeing so many young faces as tonight's talk is going to sort of really focus on not so much my final designs, but really the ideas behind what I do, focusing on three main projects that started maybe 10 years ago when I was freshly graduated from university.

So I hope this gives you a little bit of perspective and maybe, you know, perhaps inspire you to make your own path, a path that is perhaps not so conventional in terms of, you know, just striving to get a job in a big company.

So it's my personal story and I hope you enjoy it.

So yes, I studied product design in Central St. Martins in London.

This was a very sort of conventional industrial design course, and I learned wonderful things from it.

But I also slowly started to realize what I didn't like from the course.

And there was also a whole process of unlearning as well, if you will.

I found my path by focusing on materials and focusing not only on the, let's say, materiality of the materials, but you know, the context in which they are grown, the context where they come from, the cultural scenarios surrounding these materials.

And, this is a big part of my practice.

So I'm not only a designer, I also consider myself an artisan or a maker, a craftsperson, if you wanna see it that way.

And this is because I like to develop a whole series of new techniques which I start to produce by myself with my hands, and then eventually teach other people how to do it.

So it's somewhere in between being a craftsperson, being a designer.

Yes.

and my practice is also very sort of multi-layered.

I really like to focus on, you know, how the global impacts the local and vice versa.

And also this extends to where I actually work and produce my things.

So I spend my time between Mexico City, London, and then this very, very, very, very tiny village in the mountains of Mexico called Tonahuixtla.

So I'll start my presentation talking a little bit more about Tonahuixtla Tonahuixtla is an indigenous community that is located in the mountains of Puebla in the south of Mexico.

It's a very, very arid area.

It's super dry, the soil is super poor.

But something that is really, really interesting about this is that Tonahuixtla is about 80 kilometers away from the oldest archeological site that evidences the beginnings of corn domestication.

So this is really at the heart, at the epicenter of where corn started to be transformed from its wild sort of relative the teosinte, into what we know today as corn.

So it's a really interesting place for the history of agriculture, but also it's a very interesting place because you have access to the direct descendants of the people that, you know, had this wonderful power of observation to domesticate this plant.

So I don't know if you knew about this, but what we know as corn today is a completely manmade plant.

There is no wild corn the way we know it, it's closest relative is the teosinte, which is that little plant.

And about 7,000 years ago, you know, some ancient Mexico American, proto Mexican, let's say that, found a really interesting teosinte that was mutated.

It had an abundance of the female sort of characteristics, meaning a lot of grain, and but also could pollinate itself so, a hermaphrodite effectively.

So this person found that interesting, took a seed from that and care for it.

And the results were the beginnings of a long, long process of selective breeding that gave us this huge diversity of corn that we have today.

So I basically had the privilege of going to Tonahuixtla as a young child.

This is a photo of me when I was six years old next to Delfino.

Delfino is someone that is very dear to me.

He was one of the bakers in my dad's bakery, became really close to my father and my father and mother trusted him enough to, you know, let us go to his village for a summer as young kids.

And me and my sister loved it.

And basically, we didn't stop going throughout all of our childhood.

This was our sort of summer activity.

Which was incredible because it was also for us, a huge lesson in seeing how diverse Mexico really is.

You know, being from Mexico City being more from a, let's say, European heritage.

For me as a young child, it was incredible to see how, you know, a fellow Mexican could be, you know, could look different ethnically, but also would speak another language, an indigenous language.

would think differently, eat differently.

And this extended all the way to the things they ate and the fruits they got access to, and especially the corn.

I've never seen corn in these colors in Mexico City, which was something really shocking to me when I was a child.

And very inspiring.

And as a kid, I also, you know, when we would go there, we would be invited to take part in the harvest and the plantings activities.

And this is where I came across this idea, well, this system called the Milpa.

The Milpa is this indigenous permaculture system where you combine three plants together to ensure soil fertility, to ensure that you don't exhaust the soil.

It's an amazing, amazing discovery, a piece of indigenous technology that basically allowed people to plant corn.

Because remember, corn is this like freak of nature.

It has an abnormal amount of nitrogen consumption.

So if you don't balance it with other plants that fix nitrogen, your soil is useless after a few seasons.

This is something that the ancient miss Americans found out, and this is what eventually led to the great civilization of the Mexican plateau.

So the Aztecs, the Mayans, the all mix, all of these people that, you know, create a huge empires would've been impossible without the discovery of the Milpa.

It's a wonderful system, but it's also a system that is completely at odds with modern agriculture.

You can't put a tractor through it, you know.

A Milpa doesn't look like a cultivation field, it looks like a garden, and you need to tend to it like a garden.

So anyways, this is also like a very sort of big contrast with how corn is planted.

Any everywhere else.

I don't know if you knew this, but corn is now the most planted grain in the world.

You wouldn't really think of it, you know, I certainly thought it was maybe wheat or rice, but corn is planted way more, I mean by a long stretch.

The problem is most of the corn planted in the world is not for direct human consumption, it's for feeding cattle, it's for making sweeteners for industrial processed foods.

More recently it's used for biofuels and bioplastics, which I think it's ridiculous.

We can get to that later.

But you know, the idea of planting food in regions where people are starving to then turn it into disposable forks and things like that, to me is totally nonsensical.

But yes, this is very much in contrast with how we view corn in Mexico.

You know, corn for our indigenous communities still consider a sacred plant.

It's something that you would never ever give to a cow.

So how do you balance these two realities?

I think that's when amazing sort of tensions arise, and this is a lot of what I focus on.

This tension started when Mexico basically joined the North American Free Trade Agreements with the United States and Canada.

It's what, you know, kind of opened all of our borders, joined our markets, and this is when really things started to become quite hard for independent indigenous farmers that, you know, have access to maybe one hectare.

The price of corn just fell to a fifth of its price from one year to the next.

And so families that were perfectly capable of surviving with their corn harvest the year after, you know, 1994, it was impossible for them to do so.

So this is a short clip of Delfino, same Delfino that you saw with me as a child, we're still working together.

And this is a short interview where he explains some of the challenges that they face.

Throughout this presentation, you're gonna see a lot of short little clips like this because these are clips that I always, every time I go to a location, I take my camera with me, I record, this is my research.

So you're getting sort of very unfiltered interviews to the characters that are very important to my work.

So here you go.

(Delfino speaking in foreign language) I think that phrase of rocks growing instead of trees is a wonderful one because he's translating from Mexico, so in Mexico, there's no word for erosion, but I feel like rocks growing instead of trees is a much more powerful way of talking about it.

So yeah, so I think my work is a lot as well about humanizing, you know, migration and seeing how these massive global changes can have, you know, such a deep impact into communities that have no really no partake in the global economy.

So this is a, another short interview with Esmeralda, she's one of the young women that work in the workshop that we have in Tonahuixtla.

I think her story is very powerful.

It's a story about her brothers that migrated to the United States and she's, I think a character that really kind of exemplifies this idea of migration.

So I'll leave you with a short clip with her.

(Esmeralda speaking in foreign language) So yes, I sort of, Esmeralda lost two of her brothers trying to cross the border.

And I think you know, this idea of that desperation to have to leave, to leave your family, to leave your children is a reality that a lot of, you know, young rural migrants live in Mexico now.

And so a lot of the project is that it's humanizing that migration.

You know, I think actually the majority of the farm workers that come to this country from Mexico are rural farm workers, mostly indigenous workers in Mexico that basically have no ways to keep on practicing their traditional lifestyle.

So it's not that they're chasing, you know, the American dream.

It's not like they want like a Lamborghini, you know, when they come back to Mexico.

It's rather more of a thing where, you know, we've created a world where their traditional lifestyle is completely incompatible with how we value, how we pay, how we remunerate work.

So I think, you know, the work is also trying to illustrate those realities.

So the challenge was, you know, how can we bring back corn?

Because essentially what happened in Tonahuixtla after this big kind of distillation of the erosion and the migration process, it became a ghost town.

They lost all of their local varieties.

And so the challenge was, how can we get them to plant corn again without avoiding the trap of, you know, commodifying this corn to sell it to upscale restaurants in Mexico City or in New York or whatever?

Which is something that is happening a lot now.

So the answer for me was to look at the leaves.

These amazing heirloom varieties have all this color in the leaves and in the grain.

So I decided to transform the leaves into a market tree material, a veneer material.

The colors that you see in this pieces are completely natural.

We don't dye them or color them in any way.

So this is just as they grow from the soil.

Market tree became this solution for me, because you're limited by the size of a corn cup, you know, it's not like you're getting a four by eight sheet of the material, like the way you do with wood veneer.

So, by creating these puzzles and joining all these pieces together, you get a continuous surface.

It's a lot of sort of thinking about pattern, but also letting go of the fact that you know, you might not control the colors.

So, you know, these are all pieces of furniture.

We also do wall applications, so modular systems that can cover whole interiors.

And I think what's really kind of nice about it is that, you know, you can kind of curate what color you put next to what, but you never know what you're gonna get.

And I always say every time you open a cob, it's like opening a present.

You don't know what you're gonna get.

So I guess the, you know, I had the material, this was the result of a residency that I did 10 years ago, but at the end of the residency I was like, okay, this has to become a bigger system.

This has to become, you know, the challenge was not creating the material, the challenge was to really create a working system where the community could really live of it.

So we collaborated with the world's largest seed bank of corn seed, that donated a whole collection of seeds from their vault that were collected in the 1950s.

And we've been slowly reintroducing these varieties.

The sort of, you know, bones of the project really are about incentivizing farmers by creating these new sources of revenue for them.

And especially focusing on women because of all the migration process, most of the men left.

And now it's a town that is mostly inhabited by mothers, you know, and young children.

And I really like to focus on women and mothers specifically, because they are the next educators.

They are the ones that are going to carry on this message to the future generation.

So over the last 10 years, we've managed to reintroduce eight species of native maize.

We partnered up with the CIMMYT, the seedbank.

And you know, we've been doing little side projects like community composting centers to create new soil for the erosion situation.

And we've created flexible employment for around 40 people.

But I think, you know, the most rewarding thing to see is that there has been a return to the Milpa.

So most of the farmers of the community now, we've managed to convince them to step away from industrial corn to go back to this permaculture system.

But without design at the heart of it, without the creation of these other, you know, sources of employment for them, nothing would happen.

And I think this is where design becomes this really interesting tool in this powerful tool.

Just to share a little bit of kind of like an economic, you know, background for it.

The average family in Tonahuixtla can make, you know, out of a couple of corn cobs by transforming into the material the equivalent of a whole harvest.

You know, that would be maybe a ton and a half in grain.

I mean, this is not only because we make very premium furniture, but it's also because the cost of the kilo of corn is just criminally low, you know?

So it just put things into perspective.

But the idea now is that, you know, most families actually live off this kind of new craft that we have created as opposed to trying to compete in a market where, you know, they're always going to be sort of not rewarded for their work.

And I think a lot of the design process has actually been focusing, not so much on the final pieces, but in creating systems of production that are fit for this context.

You know, so it's very low tech solutions, very cheaply made and cheaply produced utensils.

Protocols that allow everyone in the community to become a crafts person, a crafts women, a crafts men, and within a week be, you know, producing with the same quality as someone that has been there for 10 years.

That takes a lot of planning, a lot of design work, a lot of trial and error, which we do in my studio in Mexico City.

And then, you know, teach members of the community.

I think, you know, when we think about design, we often think about urban design, really, most of the context is always within cities.

But I think for me, the real challenge was to let that part go of thinking about industry, thinking about cities and thinking more about the rural design.

And I think, you know, the answer for anyone that might be thinking of this is, you have to be there, you have to live within this communities.

I've been personally involved in every harvest for the last 10 years.

And I think when you're part of the harvest, you start to notice things.

So for example, we developed this little sort of very DIY machine, which has a circular blade, and that's used to separate the leaves from the cob in a very sort of swift motion.

And this is a very simple solution that, you know, we came together as they were explaining, "Hey, you know, we're taking too long with a little knife and, you know, the leaves break apart."

So this is problem solving and design thinking, but applied to a rural context.

And I think, you know, a big part of the project has been also about focusing on the families and encouraging the families to be part of every step in the process, from being the farmers to eventually working in the workshops.

And I think it's also a project that really deals with migrants, but in this case it's returning migrants.

You know, during the pandemic when all these people lost their jobs working in restaurants in the United States or in the fields in the United States.

And obviously had no social security, no furlough, no nothing, you know, what was their option?

It was just to go back.

So it's, another part of what we're doing is trying to see, make them see a future in going back to the traditional practices and reintegrating into their communities.

And so, you know, you might be wondering, you know, here in Michigan, why would the story of Tonahuixtla be of importance to you?

And I think, you know, everyone should really care about this.

This is a graph that I found in National Geographic a few years ago, and it shows the huge sort of depletion in diversity over the last century.

I mean, you know, most of these varieties that took probably 10,000 years to be selectively bred and developed from wild plants are being lost in less than 100 years.

You know, when we go to a supermarket, we might go in there and see it as a place of abundance, but really what you're looking at is a desert of diversity.

I mean, you can barely get a couple of options of every plant when there's hundreds of them.

And this has been by design, you know, it's much easier to standardize everything.

It's much easier to make everything look and taste the same.

And I almost get a feeling that we're trying to do the same with people.

Anyways, next project, I'm gonna start to talk about Agave, which I describe as the magical plant.

Agave.

Well, I'll leave you with a little video, so you see how I work with Agave.

I really like working with agave.

It's such a fantastic plant.

Nowadays, it's mostly used to make tequila and their leaves are just thrown away, which is a shame because you can make fibers from them.

It's actually quite simple.

You just have to beat them and scrape the leaves.

When the fibers are washed and dried, they turn to a lovely long color.

These fibers are called sisals.

And for centuries they were considered the best material for making ropes and fishing nets.

But unfortunately, the invention of plastics put most sisal growers out of business.

It's hard to find raw sisal nowadays.

I personally like to leave the fibers loose.

They really feel like hair.

I actually sometimes like to call it vegan horsehair.

Yeah.

So like I said in the video, you know, most people maybe come across agaves and think about tequila, think about mezcal, think about agave syrup.

But that's just the core of it.

The leaves are just full of these fibers.

And these are some of the objects that I've done with them.

So, you know, traditionally and the traditional crafts people spin them and turn them into a flat weave, turn 'em into a textile.

But yeah, I like to, you know, basically work at it like hair and my process is usually getting to know the material and then deciding what's the best shape for it, you know, because for example, with corn, yeah, it's very flat, it can be very angular, it can be very precise.

But with agave it's a complete different thing.

So, you know, it's so much like animal hair that I think at the end, the shapes have to be animal-Like, I mean, when have you seen a square dog?

You know?

So I mean this last image that you saw is the agave fibers dyed.

So whenever I make these kind of choices of what to use, I like to be as logical as possible.

So it makes no sense to start using the supernatural material and then use chemical dyes for it, you know?

So I try to use natural dyes as much as possible.

So this is one of the main ways in which I die to make pink.

So this is something called Cochineal.

It's an insect that grows in the prickly pear cactus.

It's an amazing sort of indigenous technology as well.

It's a domesticated insect.

Could be compared to the silk worms in China.

I mean, I could make a whole presentation about Cochineal, it literally changed the world.

It's what opened trade between the Spanish empire and the Chinese empire.

So you could almost argue that it was silver and Cochineal that started globalization.

But anyways, these are some of the installations that I've done.

This was in Art Basel in Miami in 2019, just before the pandemic, very large scale installation.

This was a massive effort 'cause it was just making like 50 of these things.

So we literally employed the whole town to get on it.

And then I started to really play with these characters that, you know, were inspired perhaps by traditional dance, but then also going back to more sort of formal pieces of furniture.

This is, for example, one of the latest piece we did last year was a bar.

But I still, you know, I still work as a designer.

So, you know, we have a C&C in the studio.

We use Rhino, we use AutoCAD, we use Blender to make all the designs, to make them replicable.

But the idea is to then, you know, almost just use technology when it's needed and to cover it with manual work because I do feel that that human touch is what makes things so special.

So this is a small clip on how we make the hair structure.

So it's all, you know, using a latch hook and going knot by knot, by knot.

I mean it's thousands or tens of thousands of knots sometimes to finish a piece.

So, you know, the average piece takes us maybe three or four months to finish.

But, you know, this is what allows us to really kind of be very mindful of what we use and what plans we use and to take the care and the love to transform these plans into the final pieces.

But the work with agave also serves as another environmental solution for Tonahuixtla Because remember, you know, it wasn't only losing the corn grain, it was also losing the ability to grow food in their lands.

By the way, something that is really interesting is that in Tonahuixtla there's no private property.

So I'm not the owner of a single square inch of these mountains.

And even the plants, you know, I help them, I mean, I purchased the plants for them, but then I donate them.

So the eroded fields that you see are communally owned.

This is for the whole community to use.

And this was a system that worked prior to the 90s.

So this is a short clip which explains the problem and some of the solution that we are finding with agaves.

The switch to these foreign system had devastating consequences in the village.

The weed killers were the worst, as they eradicated most of the wild shrubs.

This caused a vicious cycle of erosion, which turned once fertile fields into desolate deserts.

The top soil has been washed away, leaving only rocks behind.

This used to be cornfields.

Nothing grows here anymore.

This is a digital representation of these mountains using topographic satellite data that helps us visualize the flow of water down the hillsides.

Without wild plants retaining the soil with the roots, there is no stopping the water during the monsoon season.

Our solution is to look back to indigenous terracing agriculture, to create physical barriers, to slow the water.

This is where agaves come into play as they are the only local plant that can withstand the heat and poor soil quality of the area.

By digging a trench and planting an agave by its side, we can achieve water and soil retention.

Since 2015, we have been digging hundreds of trenches and we have planted thousands of agaves of different varieties.

45,000 to be precise.

The idea here is to plant the agaves along the trenches, which are spaced out every 50 meters and are leveled.

This turns the trenches into small pools that filter the water through the bedrock, replenishing the water table and the wells needed for farming.

The long-term goal is to retain enough soil and water to allow for the wild plants to come back.

It might seem strange to call this, but what we are doing is actually reforestation.

It's all about finding local solutions to regenerate the land.

But in order to see the scale of this project, you have to take to the sky.

This view viewpoint really shows the magnitude of our efforts.

It's a beautiful thing to see those green lines we created, crisscrossing the mountains, and of course, to see the beginnings of new growth.

Yeah, so I mean, this is a very, very, very, very long term project.

And I think for me, it was really what started to really make me, making me think about the time, you know, and legacy.

The idea of starting to plant agaves was actually Delfino's idea, as he became the leader of what's called the indigenous assembly of the town.

So, when I basically re-encountered Delfino in 2015, you know, I saw him and a group of men in their seventies digging holes and planting agaves.

And, you know, the average lifespan of an agave before it reproduces is seven to eight years.

And a lot of these men, you know, are not there anymore.

So it really kind of made me think, you know, what is the actions that they are doing?

It's really not a benefit that they will reap.

They're doing it for my generation and maybe the younger generation.

And so for me, that was really inspiring.

And this was when I was like, well, but how will you keep this going?

Because there's a lot of efforts at the beginning, but with a lot of reforestation and environmental efforts, it's always the same problem.

If you don't find a way to finance this, it just fizzles out.

And unfortunately, you know, in Mexico, most of the support comes from the government and it's always temporary, and it's always very attached with things that they want in return.

So the way of this idea of producing the fibers, creating employment there, it's a way to keep on planting.

It's a way to make it not only environmentally sustainable, but economically sustainable to keep it going for years and years.

So this is a small clip of, you know, right before the summer rains.

We rally basically everyone in town to go and dig holes and plant the agaves.

In average, we plant about 10,000 agaves a year.

So, I mean, I know that the video said 45,000, but this is from a few years ago.

We're reaching 150 by now, 150,000 agaves.

And these are agaves that, you know, we purchased from nurseries and planted.

But once they take hold, they start to reproduce, they start to copy themselves.

And what we do that is very different from a mezcal tequila plantation, is that we don't kill the plant.

To make mezcal tequila, you have to cut the whole plant out.

We just prune it, use those leaves to make the fibers and let the plant reproduce itself.

So this is actually a super fresh video.

I just took it a couple weeks ago.

And this is the same image that you saw earlier on, only a couple of years after.

So it doesn't look like much, it's still pretty eroded.

But if you really look at it, for example, in every hole there's a new little tree that is growing, And those trees are natural, we have planted that.

So these holes with the agave holding the soil with the roots are really making a huge impact.

The whales that are closest to this mountain have about 40% more water than the ones in the opposite side of the village.

In the recent years where we've had unbelievable drought, this has really made a difference for the farmers.

And this is actually, yeah, two weeks ago after a heavy rain.

And it was so amazing to see the system working, you know, retaining water, grass, green grass in there.

Like I said, the image over there, that's a little tree that just propped up in the last year.

And this is a mesquite.

I mean, that growth, huge.

So if you see the, the image over there, that's an area that we reforested about six years ago.

So that's the goal, you know, eventually to get to that point where you have the agaves as what we call pioneering plants, inviting all these other wild plants to come back and to start regreening these mountains.

But this is something that will take decades, decades, I mean, maybe not even in my lifetime.

So, you know, it's really about thinking super long term here.

Anyways, next project, last project.

This is a big project that focuses mostly on research, and it's, again, really focusing on agriculture, farmers, global tensions.

So I call it Conflict Avocados.

Avocados are these, you know, another staple of Mexico.

Another plant that was domesticated by ancient Mexicans for millennia.

They were considered a sacred plant.

We also have a huge variety of avocados.

I mean, close to 40 different species.

Some look like a cucumber, some you can eat with the skin on, some don't have a pit.

It's really, really interesting.

It's also a plant that has been very heavily modified, and perhaps its most successful modification came in the 1940s in Rudolph's Hass backyard.

So Rudolph Hass was a horticulturist and also a mailman from California.

Very, very skilled horticulturist.

And he basically came across another kind of freak of nature, which was this random tree that he had in his backyard that produced avocados, that had much thicker skins, that took a lot longer to mature.

And he started to get clippings from that tree, started to hybridize it with other trees, and that's where the Hass variety came about.

And now it represents 95% of all the avocados traded in the world.

Why?

Simply because they can travel better.

They have a thicker skin.

You know, a lot of the other varieties that I described, if you don't eat it within two days of cutting it, they're done.

So again, we come back to this sort of very, very sort of determining moment in the history of agriculture in Mexico with NAFTA.

Prior to NAFTA, there wasn't a single avocado being traded between Mexico and the United States.

This was a little bit of protectionism from the California growers knowing that the Mexican avocado would totally put them out of business.

But the official excuse was that there was a plague that could decimate the Californian orchards All of a sudden after the negotiations of NAFTA, the plague became, you know, under control right before the signing of the treaty.

And you know, what was super interesting in my research was that basically the deal was Mexico said, "Yes, you can start to export corn to Mexico."

And the states said, "Well, you can in exchange start to export avocado."

So, the two sort of main sort of focuses of my projects have this, you know, very kind of momentous, yeah, moment agreement in 1994.

So what's really interesting as well is that most of the avocados, well, all of the avocados that you eat here, they're coming from Mexico, come from one state, State of Michoacán.

And what's really interesting is that the growers of the state of Michoacán created this association called avocados from Mexico.

And they were really responsible for creating demand.

You know, there wasn't that much demand for avocado in the 90s in the United States.

And it was this sort of lobbying group in Mexico that almost went bankrupt hiring one of the biggest advertisement companies and booking the prime spot in the Super Bowl in 1999.

But it totally paid off.

This sort of new tradition that was invented to eat guacamole on Superbowl on Sunday was a result of that.

And that's when export started to go crazy.

So this is a footage of, I mean, I still can't believe that we got access to this plant, but basically I went into one of the biggest packaging plants in Uruapan, Michoacán where they pack hundreds and thousands of avocados per hour for export.

So this is a small clip, and the narration is by Rui Isley, who was an avocado trader, a dissolution avocado trader.

But he's gonna give you a little bit of insight into that.

(Rui speaking in foreign language) So like I said, nine out of 10 avocados that you consume here come from the State of Michoacán The state of Michoacán is this amazingly lush and fertile state.

You wouldn't think this of Mexico, but it almost looks like know the French Alps or something.

It's like endless pine forests.

And it's also very important because it is the nesting sites of the monarch butterfly.

So I'm sure you've all seen a monarch butterfly here.

All of the monarch butterflies of North America fly down to Mexico from as far as Canada to go to this one little forest in Michoacán, every year.

No one knows how, no one knows why.

And what's actually super impressive is that also they arrive always on the 1st of November, which coincides with the Day of the Dead.

So there's a whole loads of superstition around the arrival of monarchs in Michoacán.

But unfortunately it's a forest in peril.

And this is, you know, sort of a, I mean, a very technical map of, you know, the deforestation that has occurred in this very critical forest, which by the way is a UNESCO heritage site that is super protected.

But it's in complete correlation with the increase in the demand for avocado, you know.

So the trend is you see a higher demand in avocado and a lowering of the population of monarchs and their forest.

This is a short video with Jose Luis Alvarez, who is an activist and also a sort of ecological businessman.

He also has sylviculturist, so a creator of forests, and he's gonna explain what happened in 2002 with the Monarch butterflies.

(Jose speaking in foreign language) So basically I started this project because my grandmother was from Michoacán and I did a trip to visit her for her 90th birthday.

And my partner at the time was a journalist.

She was working for the BBC, and we both got hooked into this whole scenario.

This is something that I've been documenting for years, is from a few years ago.

So I try to go every winter to see the monarchs, and it's just heartbreaking to see that year after year they have to go up, up higher and higher and higher into the mountains because, you know, there's just less and less and less forest.

And again, this forest has to be, it's meant to be one of the most protected areas in the world.

So this is us.

That's Saskia, that's my sister.

And I had my arm around Homero Gómez, who was the president of the Monarch Sanctuary.

He was an amazing, amazing activist that was very elemental into convincing all of his community to stop deforesting, and instead see a future in ecotourism and protecting the butterfly.

He was someone that also had a great way of speaking, an amazing contact with politicians and with donors, and just such a pillar in terms of environmental activism.

But unfortunately, you know, his work also made him a target from people that wanted access to these forests.

And, you know, a year after we met, we were getting ready for a second interview, which unfortunately never happened because he was murdered.

To me, learning of his murder was just so devastating.

I mean, obviously for personal reasons and because we met.

But also because it really got me thinking this is one of the most celebrated activists in the country.

You know, how can he be ended so easily?

And you know, his murder is still unpunished, which is also a trend down in Mexico.

Mexico is now officially the most dangerous country in the world to be an environmental activist.

It's the most dangerous in the world to be a journalist, in an area that is not at war.

So, I mean, you have to have some serious balls to be talking about environmental issues there.

And so to me, it really sort of, you know, his death really started to make me think of the project differently.

Because initially I was just going to focus on, okay, yeah, you know, we are eating too much avocado ever in the world that's killing the forest, which is killing the butterflies.

But Homero's death really started to make me think and look at the factor of violence when dealing with environmental loss.

And I think this is the sort of more urgent cause in places like Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, it doesn't really matter if your bottle is biodegradable or not.

You know, the plastic problem is almost like a side issue.

I think this is the main issue.

So this kind of connected me to another community, a community that basically suffered a lot of abuse by illegal loggers that were in cahoots with a corrupt government that basically gave their forest away.

And so, I mean, they were cutting down whole mountains of forest every month.

There was not only a lot of violence against the forest, but also against the community, and especially the women.

And the story that I'm gonna present now is the story of Doña Chepa who is a woman that basically got their community together to the defend their forest.

(Doña speaking in foreign language) I think for me, the story of Cherán is really a story of hope, of community unity, of courage.

You know, to see Doña Chepa that is in her sixties, you know, to organize this women to fight effectively armed men was insane.

And I think what's really interesting about Cherán is that their story was so scandalous that the federal government was forced to recognize their absence.

And with the help of an NGO of lawyers, they basically found out that because they were indigenous people, they could self govern.

So Cherán is now officially a micro state with its own rules, its own way of government, which is now a matriarchy because the women are the mayoress of the town.

And yeah, it's just an incredible example of how things can be really turned around.

Now they have their own community police, which you see there.

They look like bad guys, but they're really nice.

They are basically forest patrols that ensure the security of their trees because since 2011, they have been reforesting and they have planted more than nine million trees.

This is through community service, through the whole community rallying together.

But I think the most significant thing is that sign that you see there.

Now, they have all agreed as a community to ban avocados altogether.

It's like basically like planting drugs for them.

So this is a really kind of impressive photograph of the difference between the re forested area on the right, you know, which is a green forest again, versus the left, which is the avocado orchards.

I mean, Cherán is basically an oasis, a green oasis surrounded by avocados as far as you can see.

So yeah, so basically the work that came out of this was a very ambitious tapestry that basically illustrates the whole fight of Cherán and how that is linked to this kind of insatiable global consumption for the avocado.

So these are all illustrations that we did based on the interviews that we conducted.

And this is the final result.

It was a 40 meter long tapestry, all dyed with avocado and marigolds, which are the Day of the Dead flowers.

Because of the story that I told you earlier.

it was a very, very ambitious project.

Took us maybe a year and a half to finish it.

This is a short clip of how we did the textile.

So it's dyeing with pits and skins that produced this tannins that eventually create this kind of pinkish colors.

And then it was a lot of sort of planning and pattern making, you know, based from our sort of master file, our graphic design master file, and then, you know, hand copying every single image.

And then deciding what patch would be the best and the most sort of relevant for that scene.

It was really nice also to be limited by how much we could dye and what colors we could obtain.

But yeah, it was maybe about 20 people involved in it.

I think mostly women, which was also a very sort of powerful piece because, you know, I kind of directed it, but it was ultimately to them to really decide how they would do the scenes.

So yeah, these are some of the images before it got assembled into the final piece.

We were looking at a lot of sort of internet trends, you know, the proposals in an avocado and, you know, the beauty tips and the Sal Bay with his burgers, with avocados, The Super Bowl.

I mean, this just idea, the tapestry is really telling this contrast between the violence in Mexico with this sort of imagery of innocence and health and, you know, almost like a vegan option, unethical option.

So yeah, for creating such a large tapestry, we also had to come up with our own sort of production methods.

So we created this really big loom that we could work on in sections.

And then we also made a material, which is done with the skins, so inspired by the Totomoxtle, it's a new market tree material that we made with skins of the avocados.

So yeah, basically it's also a market tree solution for furniture making.

And it's using, you know, it's a very, very painstaking process of flattening the skins and drying them and cutting them and assembling them.

And it takes a really long time.

Yeah.

But the pieces are really beautiful at the end.

So again, a lot of my methods are just very DIY, very low tech, very craft intensive.

But yeah, this is some of the images of the final pieces.

So it's something between leather, almost rusted metal, wood.

It's a very interesting material.

And I like to always photograph my work with images that really kind of tell a story.

So this is, you know, we managed to get a gun and we placed it inside of the cabinet to allude to this violence.

Another piece in the work was inspired by Japanese boro.

So boro is this sort of patchwork technique to repair workers' wear, where eventually you end up using so many patches that it becomes a pattern itself.

I really like the idea of repair.

And so this piece is really kind of thinking about repairing.

It's a Mexican boro all done with the offcuts of the textile, but it's perhaps hinting at a possible repair of a broken system.

So this is the final piece, which is also kind of inspired by funeraly items as our coffin.

And the reason for that is because it's inspired in Homero and the relationship that we have, and it's a homage to the life of Homero as an activist.

As an activist, that gave his life protecting the butterflies.

So I'll leave you with one last clip, which this is a short video that I did right after his death, with the permission of his family, I got a lot of the audios of the Facebook videos that he did to invite tourists to visit the sanctuary.

And I paired up with some images that I recorded the day that we met.

So this will hopefully give you a little bit of an idea of how he used to speak.

(Homero speaking in foreign language) (audience clapping) So, I mean, as a final thought before my conclusions, you know, I wish I could give you like a definite message about what to do with this.

I really don't have an answer, but something that I kind of really think about and something that I've thought about was when I was younger and I was learning about the history of the Aztecs, I heard about this story about how Hernán Cortés, the Spanish colonizer, was thoroughly impressed by the banquets that Moctezuma, the last Aztec emperor used to offer.

You know, he invited to a banquet and Moctezuma used to get a fresh delivery of fish from the Gulf of Mexico, which is like 400 kilometers away.

And it was basically like a series of sprinters that would bring like a live fish all the way down to Mexico City.

And just like that he would get fruits from the jungles and he would get, you know, edible flowers from cactuses in the north of the country.

And it was just such a feast that Cortés was like, "I mean, definitely not even the king of Spain is eating this way."

You know, like it was just so lavish.

And when I think about it today, the average person probably eats like Moctezuma, the average person in a developed country.

So I mean, we are eating like emperors.

We are eating, like, there is no end to this.

So I think this will be, you know, a parting thought.

It's just to really think about the series of actions and consequences of obtaining fresh produce from around the world, especially non-essential foods.

I mean, avocado is just a vanity food at the end of the day, you know, you don't need it to really live.

So it's fine to eat it occasionally, but I would urge you to maybe skip it on your next Sunday brunch.

So, conclusions.

I think for me, indigenous communities have to be included in policy making decisions regarding environmental topics.

They are the least contributors to climate change yet, you know, they are some of the worst affected.

They kind of get the buy side of globalization without really being part of it or using its advantages.

I think for me, you know, it's part of my job as a designer and as a communicator and as an activist, is to create these conversations and these spaces for these people to be heard.

So for example, I was invited to the World Economic Forum right before the pandemic.

If you're not familiar with this, it's basically where all the capitalists of the world and the governments go and kind of play and mingle and meet.

But it's also a really interesting place.

I mean, I remember that year I saw everyone from Donald Trump to Greta Thunberg, you know, under the same conference.

And in between all of 'em, I managed to convince the organizers to include Delfino and Nicolas, which is the head of the workshop there, to talk about the challenge that they face as indigenous people today.

So that was an amazing opportunity because, you know, you see me today speaking on their behalf.

But I think that was a wonderful moment where I kind of took a step back and let them speak.

And ooh, I dunno what happened with the slide, but basically for me, it's not so much about sustainability, but regeneration.

I think we've gone too far.

I think we can't solve the environmental crisis without first solving the crisis of inequality.

You know, if the only way to dig yourself out of extreme poverty is to go and cut down the forest behind your house, you're gonna do it.

You know, if it comes between feeding your children, educating them, housing them, and clothing them and cutting down a few trees, you're gonna do it.

I would do it.

You would do it.

You know, so we have to first create a world where wealth is distributed more equally if we want to really take seriously this idea of protecting nature.

And I think we can't do this without dealing the ghost of our colonial pasts.

But I think designers can have an amazing role in proposing radically new systems, which are fair and that are collaborative, truly collaborative and non extractive.

And yes, I think, you know, the environmental crisis is a manmade crisis.

You know, there's this new sort of train of thought coming out today where we, you know, some people are saying, we should forget this idea of human-centered design to focus more on nature-centered design.

But I don't think we should forget about human-centered design.

I think we just need to diversify what kind of humans are we designing for?

What kind of issues are we going to approach?

We've been focusing way too long in urban contexts and you know, communities in the developed world.

So yes.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

(audience cheering) (audience chattering)