World Hope Forum Mexico
World Hope Forum Mexico
Aired Saturday, May 20th
“We are one and we are many.”
As the fashion designer and World Hope Forum Ambassador for Mexico Carla Fernández say in her Manifesto, "We learn every day from each other and from ourselves; we discover the limits of who we are as individuals and what we are as a team. We dream of growing and work to achieve it. We weave a web of collaborations that connects us, sustains us, and makes us stronger to face the enormous challenge of maintaining creativity and independence.”
Join Carla and inspiring artists, architects, chefs, and other creatives who will demonstrate the power of identity, collaboration, peace, and hope.
PROGRAM
Welcome, with Li Edelkoort, Co-Founder, WHF
Carla Fernández, Fashion Designer & WHF Ambassador for Mexico
Alejandro D’Acosta, Architect & Founder of Taller de Arquitectura
Remigio Mestas, Weaver & Promoter of Oaxacan Artisanal Textiles
Norma Listman & Saqib Keval, Chefs & Owners, Masala y Maíz
Doris Sommer, Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative, Harvard University
Pedro Reyes, Artist & Collaborator of Tlacuilo Library
Fernando Laposse, Designer & Textile Artist
Discussion & Concluding Words
SPEAKERS
Carla Fernández
Ambassador WHF Mexico - Designer
"Another fashion system is possible," says Mexican fashion designer Carla Fernández. She creates haute couture designs throughout Mexico. Fernández's work preserves and celebrates centuries-old textile techniques belonging to Indigenous communities and other popular and urban collectives in Mexico. At an early age she traveled with her father, then the director of museums and exhibits of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. Through this she learned about Mexico's diverse heritage and began collecting garments made by Indigenous and mestizo artisans. After studying art history and fashion design, Fernández turned her attention to traditional techniques of clothing construction in Mexico. Maintaining these techniques and imbuing them with innovation became the root of her practice. As she says: "To be original is to go back to the origin. The Fashion House that she heads together with her partner Cristina Rangel, collaborates in the design and production processes with artisans across Mexico, by celebrating their living cultures, and by using the house’s global platform to promote social justice and fair trade.
Pedro Reyes
Artist
Pedro Reyes studied architecture but considers himself a sculptor. Although his works integrate elements of theater, psychology and activism. His work takes a variety of forms, from penetrable sculptures to puppet productions. In 2008, Reyes initiated the ongoing Palas por Pistolas project in which 1,527 guns were collected in Mexico through a voluntary donation campaign to produce the same number of shovels to plant 1,527 trees. This led to Disarm (2012), where 6,700 destroyed guns were transformed into a series of musical instruments. In 2011, Reyes started Sanatorium, a transient internationally-touring clinic offering brief unexpected treatments mixing art and psychology. In 2013, he presented the first edition of pUN: The People’s United Nations at the Queens Museum in New York. pUN is an experimental conference in which ordinary citizens act as delegates from each of the UN countries and try to apply techniques and resources from social psychology, theater, art and conflict resolution to geopolitics. Subsequent edition of pUN toured Los Angeles and Kanazawa, Japan. In late 2016, Reyes presented Doomocracy, an immersive theatrical installation commissioned by Creative Time. In addition, continuing his work with firearms, he presented Return to Sender (2020) at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, which consists of a series of music boxes constructed from gun parts. Each box reproduces a well-known classical piece from the country of origin of the respective manufacturer. Recently, Reyes was commissioned by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists together with ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winners of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, to raise awareness of the growing risk of nuclear conflict, for which he developed Atomic Amnesia, presented in Times Square in 2022. For his work on disarmament, Reyes received the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2021.
Norma Listman & Saqib Keval
Chefs Owners Masala y Maiz
Masala y Maiz explores the migration of people, culinary techniques, ingredients, cultural foodways and political movements between South Asia, East Africa & Mexico. Chef-Owners Norma Listman & Saqib Keval dreamed of Masala y Maiz as a restaurant like few others. The restaurant is based on their years of research to understand the intersections of their respective cultures and the many similarities between their foodways. They cook in those shared flavors and histories. The food is a mestizaje- an organic blending of cultures over generations often in response to colonization & displacement. Masala y Maiz opened in 2019 as a restaurant to celebrate the cultures in between that happen when people come together. The food is intensely personal, based on the family recipes & histories of Norma & Saqib. The restaurant is a reflection of the chefs’ belief that food can be used as a powerful tool in the struggle for justice and that chefs have the responsibility to advocate and work towards bettering labor conditions for everyone in the food industry. Masala y Maiz is a community project that puts workers and farmers first. Norma and Saqib met in the kitchen in Oakland, CA tracing their ancestral recipes and shared foodways. They started Masala y Maiz as an independent research project but it has now grown to become a restaurant group in Mexico City that includes 2 restaurants, a worker-owned cooperative grocery store, a chef & artist residency program and a cooperative natural wine project. Born and raised in Texcoco and Mexico City, Norma Listman has spent her life chronicling Mexican food craft and foodways. Saqib's heritage is from India, but home for him is East Africa where his family has been for the last 200 years. Their menus are equal parts history lesson, activist project and culinary storytelling. Norma and Saqib are inspired by and drawn to projects that put workers, community and justice first. They work in collaboration with the designer Carla Fernandez and her Manifesto de la Moda en Resistencia.
Alejandro D’Acosta
Architect
Alejandro D'Acosta is a Mexican architect focused on working with more sustainable and recycled materials as a response to environmental damage that is caused by architecture. Throughout his career, D'Acosta has generated various projects and works on gardens, restoration, architecture, graphic and industrial design, ecological rescue, self-sustaining subdivisions and wineries. He is a member and founder of the Munzam Foundation for highly marginalized communities in Mexico, as well as the design firm Taller de Arquitectura (TAC) and founder of the La Carretilla fund, which helps buildings in highly marginalized communities; he has donated more than 22 buildings in Mexico (Oaxaca, Chihuahua, Baja California).
Tlacuilo
Tlacuilo is an app that works like a library card. You can browse the catalog of libraries that use Tlacuilo and request titles on loan -- either to be collected at the library or to be delivered to you. Just like you order food or a taxi, now you can borrow books for free and enjoy them wherever you are. Tlacuilo allows libraries to keep control of their collections and communicate with users, making sure the materials they lend are tracked so they can continue to be enjoyed by future readers. Every user can post their own books to be borrowed, too. With Tlacuilo, everyone is a librarian -- choose books from your personal collection to share and connect with others about the subjects you love. The world is full of libraries that no one uses. Today, there are more books than readers! We thrive on the vicarious joy of sharing the experience of books. Tlacuilo started in 2019 when I began lending out books from my own personal library through the Instagram account @tlacuilobiblioteca. Then we started activating other libraries, like the book and record collection of composer Conlon Nancarrow. In 2021 we opened Mexico’s first art lending library at the Carrillo Gil Museum, where, in addition to books, you can borrow artworks to enjoy at your home for a 3-month period.
Fernando Laposse
Designer
Fernando Laposse is an award-winning Mexican designer who creates bespoke furniture, tapestries and sculptures which are conceptually and texturally rooted in the natural world. The designer specialises in transforming humble materials into refined artistic pieces. His neo-vernacular, experimental approach to design combines textiles and carpentry to create bespoke installations with a societal narrative. Laposse blends contemporary and traditional textile processes with (often overlooked) natural materials, such as dyeing agave twine using cochineal insects to create his signature colour palette of warm pinks, browns and oranges.
Informed by his own extensive cultural, geographical, and historical research, each of Fernando Laposse’s projects considers solutions to different social and/or environmental issues through the transformative power of regenerative design. His works address topics such as biodiversity loss, grassroots resistance and the impact of globalisation on local agriculture. In this vein, Laposse often works with indigenous Mexican communities, not only to create local employment opportunities but also to elevate their perspective and experiences, raising awareness about the challenges these communities face in a globalised world.
Laposse’s breakthrough project Totomoxtle is a play on traditional marquetry using modest materials. The surface harnesses the spectrum of colour seen in the husks of heirloom corn whilst highlighting the cultural significance of maize in Mexico. This project set the tone for Laposse’s practice moving forward, expressing a vision of responsibility, sustainability and community.
@fernandolaposse www.fernandolaposse.com
Doris Sommer
Professor
Doris Sommer is the Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University and a Professor in the Departments of Romance Languages and African and African American Studies. She is an associate at the Bloomberg City Center, Harvard Kennedy School of Government. A recipient of public education, Sommer is dedicated to linking academic research with civic service, through Pre-Texts, https://pre-texts.org/ a teacher training program that combines literacy with innovation and civic culture. She also directs the Renaissance Now program https://www.renaissancenow-cai.org/ which includes the "Arts and Public Policies" diploma course to train municipal cabinets in the use of the arts to address complex challenges. Among her books are Foundational Fictions: National Novels in Latin America (FCE), Hugs and Rejections: How to Read in a Minor Key (FCE) Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Duke UP) and Art Works in the World: Citizen Culture and Public Humanities (Heavy Metal, 2020).
Remigio Mestas
Weaver and promoter of Oaxacan artisan fabrics
Originally from Villa Hidalgo Yalalag (in the Sierra Norte of the state of Oaxaca, a region that, like all those of this entity in southern Mexico, is characterized by its enormous production of garments woven on a waist loom and embroidered by hand), Remigio Mestas learned from the making of textiles from his home town in early childhood, and later, when he migrated to the city of Oaxaca, he discovered the attraction that these garments had for the visitors of the artisan shop that his mother owned.
It was in this way that Remigio, today a specialist in textiles and perhaps the most educated of Oaxacan connoisseurs in this field, made the art of weaving his passion and life purpose, until he raised it to the exceptional levels for which he is now recognized, especially in the recovery of textile fineness, in its promotion and sale, and in the organization of weavers from indigenous communities.
With almost half a century of experience, the master Remigio Mestas has brought techniques, materials and looms to different states of Mexico and countries of the world, with which he worthily spreads this artisan heritage of Oaxaca; and in the same way he has managed to enrich local textiles and recover a task that modernity was condemning to oblivion.
He is also the founder of several artisan textile stores in the city of Oaxaca, Mexico City, and San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato; Likewise, he is the promoter of groups of indigenous weavers, among others "Brothers of Strands", who have found in their ancestral trade a new way of living and thus maintaining the diversity of native cultures. Without a doubt, the contribution of Remigio Mestas to this redefinition of Oaxacan artisan fabrics has been decisive.
Lidewij Edelkoort
Co-Founder World Hope Forum
One of the world’s most renowned trend forecasters and colorists, Li is an intuitive thinker who constantly tracks how socio-cultural trends evolve. She is also a publisher, humanitarian, educator and exhibition curator. From 2015 to 2020 she was the Dean of Hybrid Studies at Parsons and she also founded New York Textile Month each September. She wrote the Anti_Fashion Manifesto in 2014 and is the co-author of A Labour of Love (Lecturis, 2020), presenting the work of a very new generation of conscious designers and makers. Her most recent endeavor is the World Hope Forum, dedicated to spreading hope across the globe through design in a post-pandemic landscape.
Philip Fimmano
Co-Founder World Hope Forum
A trend analyst, design curator and writer, contributing to Trend Union’s forecasting books, magazines and strategic studies for international companies in fashion, interiors and lifestyle. Fimmano along with his partner Lidewij Edelkoort, has co-created exhibitions for museums and institutions around the world, including Tokyo's 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Design Museum Holon and the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. In 2011, he co-founded Talking Textiles; an ongoing initiative to promote awareness and innovation in textiles through touring exhibitions, a trend publication, a design prize and free educational programmes – including New York Textile Month, a citywide festival celebrating textile creativity each September. Fimmano teaches a forecasting masters at Polimoda in Florence and is on the board of directors for the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe.