A Futuristic Vision for Latin America, Rooted in Ancient Design | Catalina Lotero | TED

My name is Catalina Lotero, and I suffer from aesthetic anxiety.

That means that while you guys probably fear planes

or some real life-threatening thing, like snakes,

I get very anxious at the idea of a poster where the font is kind of off

or a room where the lighting is not right.

On the bright side, this same feeling

has taken me around the world of design and aesthetics.

In 2018, I moved to Japan for five years

as an academic design and aesthetics researcher

for Keio University in Tokyo.

There I did a lot of research

because as a Latin American,

I really wanted to understand the why

behind Japan's confidence and pride in their aesthetics,

which I felt where I grew up I didn't have.

In my research, I understood that a lot of Japan's design icons

trace back at least 1,000 years, minimum.

They have very purposefully selected, protected and evolved the elements

that make up their aesthetic landscape.

And I was very interested in finding out.

So I found out that aesthetics

hold a very big, influential power on us.

They influence our everyday actions and decisions without us knowing.

And in Japan, I was always in awe of very well-known objects and spaces,

like the temple,

the tatami room,

the kimono,

and actually the tatami room was my favorite one.

And if you guys don't know what a tatami room is,

a tatami room is a space designed approximately 1,200 years ago,

with very soft floors made of straw,

and it was done to perform some ceremonies,

but one of them is the tea ceremony.

And I actually had a tatami room in every single apartment I had in Tokyo.

My apartments were super tiny, super, super small,

and yet they had a tatami room.

And me and my husband would use the tatami room as our bedroom.

So we had a lot of time to spend there

and analyze its origin, its design, its style and its meaning.

And I was there, lying there, awake at night,

when I started to wonder

what is the equivalent of the tatami room in my own Latin American culture?

What are the things, objects and spaces that trace back in our region

at least 1,000 years

and that still give me meaning today?

I'm very ashamed to say I couldn't think of any.

I couldn't think of a ritual,

I couldn't think of a space, an architectural structure.

Nothing would come to mind.

So I started asking, why?

Why don't I have this knowledge?

And well, the answer is now obvious to me,

but it wasn't at the time.

Colonization.

Turns out that during the European conquest to Latin America,

they erased almost every type of knowledge documenting --

document that we had,

either Mexican codexes or Peruvian quipus.

They burned or stole them.

So a lot, a lot was lost.

And what they did to codexes and to quipus,

they did to our spiritual beliefs,

to our concept of what beauty is,

and they did to everything that was very important to these cultures.

So our pre-Columbian cultures were not allowed to evolve and refine.

So I decided to turn to design to correct this.

And I asked: What would Latin America look like

if its pre-Columbian civilizations had evolved without colonial interruption?

And the quest for the answer of this question

is something that I like to call pre-Columbian futurism.

Pre-Columbian futurism is a speculative design project

that seeks to dig the hidden stories and messages

of our precolonial communities

and bring them into today through design.

So I started with the equivalent of the Latin American tatami room,

which is where it all started.

Turns out, I learned, that pre-Columbian civilizations

do a lot of rituals around the coca leaf,

just as the Japanese have their own tea ritual.

And the coca leaf is very important.

Not only was it important before,

but it's still today for a lot of indigenous communities.

So I identified common features

that the spaces dedicated to the coca leaf have,

and for example, they were all rounded,

they had a central fire, they had floor seating,

they had metallic jars where you could spit in.

And I took those, and I brought them to today.

So usually they were decorated with altars dedicated to gods.

Gods of corn, gods of the moon, the sun,

or Chía and Sué,

as they call them in the Chibcha dialect.

And I was hooked.

I really, really enjoyed the process so much

because I did a lot of visual research,

and during my visual research,

some other things started to pop out and get my attention.

One of those things was chairs.

It's very, very hard for us industrial designers

to ignore a good chair.

So I did the same that I did with the coca room,

and I identified common design traits

in some of the chairs in Aztec codexes,

mostly, like, they all had sharp angles.

They look very heavy when you look at them.

They have a similar color palette.

And my favorite part when I brought this design to today

was how they depicted the way they made these chairs comfortable,

using jaguar skin.

But not only did I find it very interesting

that they used jaguar skin,

but the way they printed and illustrated this jaguar skin.

So I became a little obsessed with the way they did it,

and I pretty much use it in everything I design now.

And jaguar skin brings us to the jaguar.

So the jaguar for a lot of pre-Columbian civilizations

was a very important, powerful god.

It was a shape-shifter,

it was able to move between the living and the dead very easily.

So it inspired a lot of creation.

It inspired them to do paintings, illustrations, pottery

and, many times, jewelry.

And that's where I found my inspiration myself.

And the jaguar was so inspiring

that I didn't only want to do something for the present,

but I started designing something, looking a little bit in the future ahead.

So I designed an earring that is also a jewelry piece,

and it has AI, and it helps you decipher visions and dreams.

Also take calls, whatever makes you happy.

But I was very, very inspired by the jaguar.

And all these loose elements,

as I start putting them together in my mind,

they start to paint a very clear picture

of what I see the future of Latin America look like

if we actually took some of our ancestral knowledge

and included it today.

Also, I mixed it with a little bit of sustainable tech

and a pinch of positivism.

And yes, I have enjoyed creating and designing objects

based on pre-Columbian futurism a lot,

but that wasn't my favorite part of this project.

My favorite part has been stumbling upon other creators

that are actively working on this.

Like, without knowing, I am part of a broader movement

of other people across Latin America

who are doing it.

For example, there are chefs like Charles Michel.

He is educating the world on coca leaf, on cacao,

tucupi and other ancestral foods.

There's Vanessa Gomez.

She is recovering antique fabrication techniques

and making them timeless.

I would get a lot of inspiration from music videos and plays in theaters

that I later found out were all art directed by Orly Anan.

She mixes a lot of pre-Columbian tradition with modern pop culture,

resulting in aesthetics that for me are very, very inspiring.

And they look very modern, yet you can still see the ancient in them.

I was walking one day down the BeltLine in Atlanta,

and I fell in love with the work of Lisette Correa as well.

It spoke to me, and after I talked to her,

I found out that she's also desperately trying to understand

her Taino heritage through her work,

not only through graffiti, but other mediums.

She's trying to communicate to the world in a way that is very accessible,

as graffiti is,

all her knowledge and her findings, which she didn't know before.

And there is Freddie Mamani, a self-taught architect from Bolivia.

He does amazing things when he starts crossing his Aymara knowledge.

He's actually an Aymara community member,

and he crosses aesthetics from the Aymara graphics and fabrics

with his love for sci-fi,

and you can definitely see it in the outer parts of the buildings.

The landscapes he’s built in Bolivia are things that make me daydream

of the potential hidden within our cultures.

And I wish there was more.

There are more, but I wish there were a lot more of us.

Because pre-Columbian futurism is just one aesthetic.

It's one way to do it.

Bringing inspiration from the past to create -- to the present,

and projecting it into the future.

But what I have learned during this process

is that everything we are designing today

is literally designing us back constantly.

So, at least as Latin Americans,

we need a future where we can see ourselves,

so we feel empowered to work towards it,

and not only wait for other cultures to tell us what the future holds

or predict the future for us,

we need to find certain features of our own

and project them into the future so we can work towards it.

Thank you.

(Applause)