S5E09 Design Activism with Fernando Laposse

Fernando Laposse is not only a true inspiration but a great storyteller. His designs are constructed throughout deep levels of culture, challenges, heritage and his great love for his home country Mexico. During our interview we talked about the essential importance of provenance, material, natural pigment and showcasing the story of indigenous communities and their daily struggles through his design work. 

Fernando Laposse is a Mexican designer with a degree in product design from Central St. Martins. His practice is material driven and focuses on transforming humble materials into refined design pieces, promoting their regenerative possibilities and tackling environmental issues. For Fernando, the material source and cultural context is of extreme importance. This has led him to forge a long-standing collaboration with Tonahuixtla, a community of Mixtec farmers in the south of Mexico. Rather than working with existing craft, Fernando develops new techniques from scratch which are then taught to members of the community. This in turn creates new sources of employment that revitalise traditional agriculture. Fernando’s projects also strive to communicate the complexity of issues like the loss of biodiversity, erosion, indigenous rights, migration, and the negative impacts of global trade on local agriculture. He does so by documenting the problems and announcing possible resolutions through the transformative power of craft and design. Fernando Laposse focuses on using lesser-known plant fibers like sisal, loofah, totomoxtle, and avocado in his work. He invests time in research to create pieces that not only showcase these materials but also highlight their connection to the culture and history of specific places and their people. Laposse works with indigenous communities in Mexico to help create jobs and bring attention to the challenges they face in today's world. His projects aim to educate and inform, addressing issues such as environmental decline, loss of biodiversity, community breakdown, migration, and the negative effects of global trade on local farming and food traditions. Laposse leads the way in documenting these problems and suggesting solutions through the power of design, showing how design can help make a difference.

Transcript

Judith van Vliet: Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to the Color Authority. This is going to be an epic episode because I'm going to be interviewing Fernando Laposse, who is a Mexican designer with a degree in product design from Central St Martin's in London. His practice is material driven and focuses on transforming humble materials into refined design pieces, promoting their regenerative possibilities, and tackling environmental issues. For Fernando, the material source and cultural context is of extreme importance. Laposse's projects raise awareness of biodiversity laws, indigenous rights, migration, and the effects of global trade on local agriculture. He demonstrates how design can tackle these challenges and offer innovative, sustainable solutions. Good morning, Fernando. Welcome to the Color Authority. How are you today?

Fernando Laposse: Good morning. I'm well. Thank you for having me.

Judith van Vliet: So, the podcast, obviously we're going to talk about color. It's not the only thing you do, but definitely your. Your color is all part of your work. But the very first question that I ask everybody on the podcast is what color is to you. So what is color to you personally, Fernando?

Fernando Laposse: I mean, I guess the. The definition of color or how we perceive color is vibration. You know, it's waves of light that go through our eyes. That's a scientific sort of definition to it, but it's something that I also feel like, I think is vibrancy. You know, vibrancy, but in the sense of almost feeling the vibrations of something, you know, and that's why I think some. Some colors are a lot more sort of appealing to me than others, because it's almost like I feel it in. In wavelength form sometimes.

Judith van Vliet: Well, you were born and raised in Mexico. You're. You are still in Mexico for at least large part of the year, I think vibrant. When we talk about Mexican color, I think that definitely is very applicable. What are. So you just said there are certain colors that you feel more acquaintance with or colors that you prefer. What are. What are those colors that you feel really vibrate with who you are, your soul?

Fernando Laposse: Well, I guess it changes, you know, because. Because it's about vibrancy. I think we also are constantly changing our. Our. Our frequency as well. You know, I mean, I think it really depends on your emotional state. So I think that sort of vibrancy, vibration frequency is also relevant to your state of mind, your emotional state. So I couldn't really tell you. I have one favorite color, but historically I'm quite attracted to pinks, the blues. But, you know, I think. I think with me, what I like is it's not so much to try and enact whatever color whenever I want. You know, it's really to understand where colors come from and almost enjoy the limitations of what you can get with natural materials with these colors, you know. So for me, pinks have been a sort of like a never ending source of inspiration because it's, it's in a way one of the easier tones to make that are still vibrant. You know, it's quite hard for example, to get like a really vibrant blue or even to get a black or even to get, you know, like. Or greens are quite complicated as well to really get in that, that really punchy color. But pinks, for some reason, it's something that you can achieve in many different ways. And I'm really quite fascinated about sort of the limitations of what each source will give you in terms of the intensity of that color.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, I think especially when we talk about one of obviously the very innate pigments that comes from, from where you were born, obviously the gala cochinilla. So it's definitely a color that you can do anything between pink, red and purple. It's just amazing what this very small insect, the color range it can do. You can play a lot with it and obviously it's not stable, but that's also fun. So you can see how the colors change depending on what type of material you. You apply on them. And of course, pink obviously being also, you know, the typical rosa Mexicano. I think you. Mexico is one of the only countries that actually has a color that when you go to the shop and you ask for rose Mexicano, they know what you want. You know, they want exactly what color it is that they need to get you. You know, it's. It's part of Mexican charisma and identity.

Fernando Laposse: Yeah, I mean, I think whoever coined that was a genius in marketing. But. But yeah, I mean color pink. Pink is definitely something that is super associated with the local culture. But I think what's really interesting is to look at the history of that. You know, like it's. Cochineal changed the world in pre Hispanic Mexico and in the colonial times. You know, I mean, I read a super interesting book that basically argues that cochineal was one of the main factors to really start global trade. I mean, we can, we can almost attached globalization to the sort of very protoic beginnings of trade between Spain and China. And one of the main goods that was traded that really actually opened the floodgates for trade because before that the Chinese kind of ruled the world and were fairly uninterested into what the Europeans could offer. And cochineal and silver from Mexico was really what would manage to give A proper bargaining chip to Spain. So cochineal is an empire builder.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah, it definitely is, yeah. I mean, just imagine the look on the faces of the Spanish colonizers when they got there and they saw this deep red and they were just like, we need to get that. And obviously, I think it came through the Port of Cadiz, and then through Cadiz, obviously it went through whole Europe. And it took root also to the root, obviously in China. It's interesting how just such a small thing, actually, indeed, like you said, created globalization. And I think this is very much of what still represents, in my opinion, the power of what Mexico is, what is Mexican design and what is its raw pigments, the materials being used in design. And this is very much what your work is about. Why, why this is so interesting to do this interview with you because born and raised in Mexico, you studied in London, in central Saint Martins, you went back to Mexico. What were your learning points from being in Europe when you went back to Mexico? What was that? What you learned and you. What, what made that first starting point of doing what you do today?

Fernando Laposse: I was studying in London, in central Saint Martins, as you pointed out. But this was at a time where there was a lot of political change. The Tories were kind of beginning their stronghold on what lasted almost 12 years of Tory rule with very strict immigration policies. And I was kind of seeing the writing on the wall when I was a student, seeing that it was going to be extremely hard for me to stay in the uk, even though I really desperately wanted to. And so I sort of started to prepare myself to what, what that return was going to be like coming back to Mexico. And I started to really ask myself these questions of like, okay, I am learning all of these sort of European style industrial design that is very catering to, I mean, it seems evident, but industry. But in Mexico, we don't really have that. I mean, we have the mega factories, you know, in the north of the country that are putting, you know, American cars together and things like that. But we don't really have self grown, self produced industrial production. So most designers here, you know, when they want to get a product out there, it's still within the limitations of very low scale industrial production or artisanal production, mostly artisanal production. And so if you really look at Mexico, what, what we, we're not a place of industry, but we are a place of craft. And I would say, you know, we're not really in a place of precision the way, you know, Germany or Poland or even Japan are. You know, we're A place of. I think our strong suits are agriculture, are understanding plants. It's really interesting to see, for example, that actually we have some of the worst carpenters probably in the world. And this has a kind of a historical reason for this. During pre Hispanic times, it was inconceivable to kill a tree, you know, so we develop other things. We're really good at stone carving, we're really good at. At weaving, weaving plants, weaving with, with natural fibers. And we're really good at agriculture. You know, we domesticated corn, one of my main materials, domesticated chocolate, domesticated vanilla. Most of the chilies of the world were, you know, domesticated and refined here. I mean, think of Indian cuisine without chilies, you know, I think about Italian cuisine without tomatoes, you know, so. And one of the many things that, that pre Hispanic Mexicans managed to do was to domesticate and selectively breed cochineal. You know, I mean, it was, it was when the Spanish, as you were pointed out, you know, came and saw this red and, and. And eventually saw where it was coming from. They call it the grana cochinilla because they, they thought grana was a grain. They thought it was a grain. They didn't understand what they were even looking at, you know, and it took about 100. It took about 150 years of subjugation to eventually getting the zapotec to cough out the secret, you know, So I mean, to think of domesticating an insect and using it that way and collaborating with it and selectively breeding it so it would produce more, you know, more acids to, to. To. To present a bigger pigment. It's just, it's just a totally different way of thinking. And, and I think I had to recalibrate this kind of, you know, obsession with speed, precision and industry towards some hybrid. You know, I mean, I still, I still take my, my learnings and understandings of how European design is carried out, and there's amazing things to learn from that, but there's a lot of things that you have to unlearn once you start to situate yourself in Latin America and especially in Mexico, you know. So I think I would say my practice now is a bit of a hybrid of that. It's really looking at the sort of strength that we have here, which I feel is we have the best farmers in the world and really seeing how we can potentiate and really work with these farmers and especially indigenous farmers to use design to solve a lot of the challenges that they are facing and really put them up in a pedestal and show, you know, what our farmers are capable of doing.

Judith van Vliet: And they're capable of a lot of the things because, I mean, we had an interview just a few weeks ago, which is also the reason why I wanted to ask you back, because there's so much knowledge within what you do. But also I think the information that you bring forward for those who are perhaps not. Not in Latin America is so important. And I think it's something that is very much heritage based. And I think that's why what makes your work also so interesting, you are really working with your roots, with your Mexican identity. How do you connect with your culture through indeed these plants and the use of the materials that you, you work with, but also the communities, because they are the ones that inspire you, I guess, for, for most of your designs and how to work and again, which resources to be using and how to use them, how to treat them as well.

Fernando Laposse: Yeah, I mean, things like heritage and things like, you know, proclaiming that something is Mexican or not, it's. Especially in design, it's a bit tricky. So it's always about thinking, okay, what makes the design of a place? The design of a place. And it's hard to put it into words with design. So I usually like to go to similar, well, to other disciplines. And so for me to define this kind of provenance of the design of a place, I like to look more at maybe the language that winemakers use. So for example, in winemaking, there's this concept of the terroir in French, you know, the territory, loosely translated. And in France, when they talk about the terroir of a wine, it's talking about the geographical, geological, climatic, but also cultural attributes that create a certain phenotype of grape that eventually creates a certain flavor profile in a wine. You know, so when they're describing why a wine tastes the way it does, they're talking about the tawag, the territory. And I love to apply that concept to design, you know, so in Mexico, it's that it's like, it's about clay, it's about plants, it's about insects, it's about, you know, the farmers. And I think that that tradition, because remember, just like the tawa, there's a very important cultural component of it, you know, because you can have the same tomato in France, but here they're gonna do completely different things to it. So I think, I think in a way, what's. What's been really great, what is very, very special about Mexico is culturally, is. But we still have a very important indigenous population in terms of Numbers in terms of people that identify as indigenous, not because of their blood, not because of their bloodline, which seems to be like an obsession in the United States, for example, where they're talking about, like, yeah, I'm, you know, 1 16th Native American, and so therefore I identify as such. Now here it's really like, do you speak an indigenous language? Do you practice indigenous tradition still? Obviously there's, there's components of ethnicity, but it has, it has more to do with cultural traditions still alive and still practiced by these families. So even though I am not indigenous and I don't identify as indigenous, you're constantly in contact with, with this wonderful thing that if you really look at all the symbolism of the nation as a whole is so deeply rooted in this past that no matter how much people try to erase it through the colonial process and through all the industrialization process of the 20th century, it's so strong, it's never going to go away, you know, so, so I think that's, that's what really informed my design and what I tried to do is to say, okay, what's the way forward now? You know, it's also not just about appropriating and utilizing all of the symbolism and all these sort of imagery that is there. I think, you know, tradition is there and it should remain tradition. So it's about innovating and it's about coming up with new things that help perhaps have this dialogue with the past, but really looking into the future and trying to really preserve what must be preserved, but also trying to project forward what's to come for the 21st century indigenous person, you know.

Judith van Vliet: Yeah. Your concerns indeed about the ecological impact, but also the social impact of your designs and how you create them, your materials is very much part of your, let's say, production process. How do you yourself ensure that you work with sustainable practices and also while protecting communities, especially the indigenous communities with whom you work with?

Fernando Laposse: Well, I mean, sustainability can be approached in many different levels. So obviously the most sort of basic and entry level approach to sustainability is materials. So I do like to set myself these sort of limitations of only working with natural, quite untouched, quite raw materials with minimum transformation. So I work with corn leaves, I work with. I got fibers more recently with avocado skins. And, and the question is always, you know, from people is like, oh, yeah, but why don't you like, you know, kind of mush it together and make like some sort of weird mdf, you know, which seems to be the approach when you start to get into trying to Produce industrially, you know, with, with natural materials. But I feel like by doing this, you kind of lose the soul of, of where that material came from. So I like to do minimum intervention to it, to the raw material. That's one approach to sustainability. It's also the traceability of that material. So I work directly with the farmers that are growing this material. But I think what my work has really strived to do is to really go several levels deeper than that, to really talk about the correlation between the inequality crisis and the climate crisis, how sustainability can also be approached from a standpoint of poverty. Poverty, I think, is one of the main contributors to issues like deforestation, like erosion, like illegal mining, you know, like poaching.

Judith van Vliet: Biodiversity, of course, of plants.

Fernando Laposse: Yeah, biodiversity lost. So there's a big social component as well to my work, which traditionally is always kind of approaching as almost different disciplines. You know, there's social design and there's sustainability. But for me, it's one in the same. You know, if you are, you know, if you're the. A member of a family, a father, let's say, of a family where you're really struggling to provide basic human rights to your. For your children, education, dignified housing, clothing, medical attention. And the only way to. For you to get enough money to give these basic things is to go down and cut the little forest behind your house. You're going to do it. I mean, I would do it. You would do it. Anyone would do it. So it's really about, you know, looking at how this kind of level of precariousness, poverty, which is obviously, you know, in profound contrast with the abundance that other people of the world live in, is one of the main drivers of all of this decimation of our natural ecosystems. And I think this is the main focus of, of my work as well. You know, it's creating objects that have stories that have information about these challenges that. Where the first sort of hook in the first sort of page in that chapter starts with material, starts by inciting curiosity about the material in the. In the eventual consumer or viewer of the piece. But then, you know, the second page of that chapter, it starts to kind of tell the story of. Yes, but it's not only about the material. It's about the people growing it. It's about the challenges of the lands where they are being grown. It's about how globalization, global markets influence their living. And so there are pieces that I like to charge with a lot of meaning and sometimes material and color is the first step to start doing that.

Judith van Vliet: You do a lot of material research indeed, and you create and that really lies at the heart of what you do. What inspired you to create the corn derived material and how was. Because also it has a lot of color and it has a lot of different colors due to the heirloom corns that you've used. How did you come about this? What inspired you to create this beautiful material?

Fernando Laposse: I was going through a bit of, I would say, quarter life crisis in London. This is 10 years ago. So actually I was, yeah, I was. I just turned 26 and yeah, I decided to leave London for a little bit and come to Mexico. And I did a residency in Oaxaca in the south of the country. Now a foundation that was started by, I mean, a titan of the arts here in Mexico, Francisco Toledo. Someone that more than, I mean, his biggest influence beside the art, I think was his activism. Francisco Toledo kind of single handedly made Oaxaca the cultural hub that it is today, or at least he was the main defender of protecting this culture for decades and decades and decades. He passed now, he died in his 80s, but I had the privilege of sort of meeting him and doing this residency in this foundation when he was still alive, but still alive and very, very active. And one of his lifelong sort of fights was to preserve our indigenous heritage corn. And 2015, so close to a decade ago, was a very sort of significant year because Mexico was putting a lot of pressure in the Supreme Court, by the way of activism and political rallies, to try and force the supreme court to ban GMOs, genetically modified organisms in general, not only for corn. And this cultural center where I was, where I was doing the residency had become the place where a lot of the protesters would come and make their protest art and their picketing and material and all of these things. It was really hard not to get involved into the topic. Plus, the topic of the residency was looking into food and design. And I just got stuck in it and decided to focus on that. For three months that I was in the residency, this was in a very kind of rural area outside of the, of the city. And I started to really interact a lot with farmers. And I think this is where design is different from arts or pure activism. There's a, there's still a problem solving component to design. And so I was like, okay, it is very likely that politically this will go ahead and the ban will be installed, but what about the economics behind the problem? You know, it's not only about just banning it, because you can ban one thing, but another thing will come about. You know, and so, you know, Mexico eventually managed to ban GMOs, so we are, it's just Mexico and Bolivia that has, in all of the Americas that have a total ban on GMOs, which have helped a lot in increasing or at least protecting the heirloom varieties because there's less chance of the cross pollination now with the GMO corn. But the main issue that the farmers face is that we've created a system where we reward quantity over quality, standardization over diversity. So supermarkets and markets in general, not interested in this, this, this, you know, lighter farms, lighter by the grain, by the kilo, and, you know, diverse in size and color. It's a nightmare for a supermarket, you know, so, so, so what we've been trying to do together for the last decade is to help farmers find new sources of revenue from these farms. And that's where I started to work with the leaves. So just for your listeners and to start picturing this, you know, you probably come across a cup of corn and it's usually yellow or a pale white. In Mexico, we have 59 different varieties of corn, most of them with their own unique color, which ranges from reds to pinks to purples to almost black. And the shape of the grains are different. All of these sort of color that is present in the grain also extends to the leaves. So what I did is I created a sort of new veneer material that can be used as a decorative surface. Obviously, we are limited by the size of the individual leaf of corn. It's not like you can get it in plywood sheet size of 8 by 4. So the solution that I found has been to turn to marketry, which is about basically cutting it into little pieces that then get assembled together almost like a puzzle. And with that you can create a continuous surface.

Judith van Vliet: And the colors are beautiful exactly because of that. Because it's really like the colors are even a puzzled within the material because I guess you look a little bit about the color, but you have to use the natural flow of the material that you've been given, right?

Fernando Laposse: Yeah. There's absolutely no way of controlling what you're going to get. I mean, I actually kind of describe it as a bit like opening a present. You know, you open a present in Christmas, you open it, you open a cup of corn, and each layer, each leaf has a different color that is totally impossible to control. So we sort of do a bit of a curation of what we, what piece we put next to what piece, but there's no way of controlling that. And I Think, for example, part of. I think my role as a designer has been to also kind of share this limitation with, I mean, especially interior designers. I don't want to throw too much shade, but, you know, interior designers are like, I. It's just kind of nonsense, you know, like, they come to you because you are the guy that worked with natural materials. And then the. They're like, yeah, can you give us like a whole range of pantone codes so we can pick from a pantone color so they match to the couch in our project? And I'm like, you know, get out of here. Like, how am I going to do that? It's a plan, you know, I mean, even within one leaf, I can give you 10 pantone. So I think it's also been, you know, learning myself, but then also teaching others about if you really want, you know, as natural as possible, you have to let go of that kind of control obsession that we have, you know, yes, it will be different colors. Yes, it will fade over time. Just like a piece of wood would fade over time. You can't have it all. You want perfection that will never change. Use plastic, you know, but you need to plastic and plastic fade as well. Yeah, so. So, yeah, so that's. That's what we do. But it's a whole social progress project as well, because obviously the town that I work with is a town that had lost a lot of their seeds during the 1990s. So it's been a huge project working with a seed bank that has helped us reintroduce these seeds that are looking into their vault, which has been on since the 1950s. So these are, you know, seeds are at least 50, 60 years old, were collected from the region in the. In the 70s, around the 70s, and are now being reintroduced thanks to the project. So it's about kind of bringing back these heirloom corn because I think we were quite lucky to be working with this community that although lost their seeds, they. The tradition is still very much fresh in their minds. You know, they were practicing these kind of agriculture up to about 10, 15 years ago. So there was no discontinuity in terms of the knowledge. And I'm happy to say that, you know, now we've successfully reintroduced eight heirloom varieties of corn. We provide employment for around 20 families, and we operate at a semi large scale, but not large enough to turn it into a factory, still working within one community without one group of families. And we're close to a decade into the project. So, you know, it's something that has proven the test of time. You know, 10 years, it's. It's already considerable.

Judith van Vliet: You grow your own materials as well, because how many agaves that you plant so that you also have material, because we all know. Well, not everybody knows perhaps how much time does it take for an agave to be ready to, to be used? I think it's minimum five years, right?

Fernando Laposse: Yeah. So this is the other big material within my practice. I got the fibers, so. So if you look at my work, there's a lot of pieces that look almost like, like hair, like animal hair. The fetal is almost like horse hair. And. And sometimes I refer to it as like vegan horsehair, but that actually comes from the leaves of the agave. And these agaves or these other project is part of the global same project so done with the same community in Tonahuixtla. And it's trying to solve the other big issue that they have, which is that of erosion. So basically this big shift that happened in the 1990s because of, you know, this big alliance that Mexico did with the United States and Canada and nafta North Free, North American Free Trade Agreement really kind of collapsed our agricultural system. Put an end to all of these sort of indigenous permaculture tradition to basically adopt American style agriculture where you use loads of chemicals and GMO seeds to get the most you can out of the land. The problem is this region. It has a very fragile soil. It's very, very arid. It's almost a desert. You only have a few centimeters of fertile soil and it's just all rock. So if you don't take care of that soil, it goes away. And that's exactly what happened in the early 2000s because of all this use of chemicals, especially the glycophate, the weed killers, basically, they eroded everything to a point where nothing grew for years. And that in turn caused a massive social issue because most of this town, most of the farmers had to migrate and ironically all migrated to be illegal workers in the United States. And I think that's part of the tragedy of Mexico that we have some of the best farmers in the world, but we don't care for them and, and we lose them. And so there's been a real sort of. I mean, here we call it a fuga. The fuga, the leak. A leak of talent that leaks into. Leaks into, into, into another country. So now, you know, we lost all these wonderful farmers are now picking whatever oranges in Florida or almonds in California or apples in Washington, or serving your meals and restaurants in the United States. And, and so I think what we've been trying to do is to create a system where we can go back to this. So to go back to the agaves, they have been a perfect solution to Rivera, this erosion process. Because what we do is we create these sort of green barriers along the hills around the village by planting them in a row and doing holes in front of them. When it rains, these holes retain the water. The agaves with their roots start to retain the little soil that's left. They start to create organic waste, which becomes new compost. And they start to invite new plants into repopulating these eroded mountains. So agaves are what's called pioneering plants. They can grow almost on rocks and with no water. And yes, you have to fight, wait about five years to cut them. If you want to use Mezcal. If you want to use them for mezcal or tequila. Right. So what we do is we don't kill them after five years, we let them keep on growing because around seven, eight years, they start to die. But they start to do their last sort of poetic act in their life, which is to shoot a 4 meter tall flower. They concentrate all of their sugars into creating this wonderful last sort of structure with all of their energy. And that flower eventually turns into thousands and thousands of little babies, either already as little baby plants up in the flower or as seeds, depending on the, on the variety of agaves. So, yeah, we started planting in 2015 and, you know, a couple of years ago, we started to see literally thousands of agaves, because by the way we planted, I mean, now officially more than 100,000 agaves. So imagine tens of thousands of agaves, all of them producing this flower at the same time. Those flowers are now inviting, for example, a new colony of bats that are the main pollinators of agaves. Pollinators get. Sorry, agaves get pollinated at night. And these bats are now flying down the hills into the corn fields where we do the other project and eating all the insects that were plaguing the corn. You know, the whales that are closer to this agave plantation now have about 30% more water than the whales in the opposite side of the floor of the village. So it's a project that is creating more water, that is creating more biodiversity, that is rebalancing the plague control, so we don't need to use pesticides. There are projects that work in tandem, and they're projects that work with the same community. And the way that we finance all of this is by using the fibers so, like I said, instead of killing the whole plant the way a tequila grower would do, we start to prune them. And we can start to prune them from the very first year that we. That we planted the agaves. The pruning helps them grow. And then with those little leaves that at the beginning are quite short, we start to make short fibers. And so if you look at my work, some of the furniture have shorter hairs, some of them have longer hairs, and that is using these leaves throughout the stages of the growth of agaves without killing them.

Judith van Vliet: Right. You color some of. Because I've seen coloreds as well.

Fernando Laposse: Yeah. So we use especially cochineal a lot. We use sometimes marigold flowers mixed with anil, which is our own kind of version of indigo here in Mexico. Yeah. We use natural dyes to do the natural coloring in agave with natural mordants as well. So alum stone, sea salt, things like that. We try to be as consistent, cohesive, and logical with our decisions of how to dye, of course, and to achieve these colors. The cochineal we get from another family that we work with in Oaxaca. It's their own personal sort of harvest. So it's really looking at all of these sort of indigenous abilities to understand the land, the tend for the plants and the little animals, and to basically embody, incorporate, and show all of these knowledge with these contemporary design objects, which I also. I think what's interesting to point out is that this community where we produce all of this was not a community that had any sort of craft before. So that's another big thing they learned. You know, everyone's like, oh, so. Yeah, so. So I think, you know, a lot of the interview questions that I get is like, also, so you work with this town of artific. Like, no, they're not artisans, they're farmers. I'm the artisan. I am the artisan. And, you know, I've created these new materials and these new techniques, and then it's about sharing them and teaching them and working together. And actually, I have a really interesting color story for you. We started with our corn. Our corn started being mostly purple hues, kind of pale pinks and things like that. And three years we were kind of limited to those colors. But then the farmers started to notice that. Well, obviously they were getting paid very well for this. So they started to get more and more interest on what they could do with the leaves. And they started to notice that one year they planted a red variety, very close to a white variety, and some of the plants cross pollinated and so they hybridized. That's another amazing thing about corn is one of the easiest times to hybridize. And they started to notice a slightly different color in the leaves. They found these two, these two varieties that hybridized and they started to create a different color, which at the beginning was quite faded. And so they found that interesting and they started to purposely cross pollinate these two varieties. And to do that, it's a whole mission. They have to get these kind of paper bags, collect the pollen from one, and then take it in a paper bag to the other one and literally shake the pollen onto the other plant and specifically hand breed the two varieties together. But the result of that, now, years later, is this amazing sort of almost like melon, peachy color that didn't exist before. It's a new hybridized plant. It's a color that I didn't ask them to do. They, out of their own sort of, you know, curiosity and interest, created a whole new color, which I have no idea how to do that. And, and so, you know, these new pieces that we're doing together with these new colors, I really see them as the first. Even though we've been working together for 10 years, I see them as the first really like 50, 50 collaboration, you know, where their skills really show us farmers. And my skills show on the design side. But I mean, if you want to use a fancy term that is perhaps more European, it's like, it's bioengineering, it's biohacking. You know, they just, I mean, they just see it as a. They just see it as indigenous farming. But, you know, it's, it's really coming up with design. It's this, it's bio designing. You know, it's thinking, okay, we're going to use the pollen of this plant combined with that plant to come with a new color, to come up with a new material, a new piece of furniture that will be radically different looking to anything I had been doing before. And that is thanks to the farmers.

Judith van Vliet: You know, that's how the Dutch get different colors of tulips. Of course, it's the same, similar process, but it's interesting because it's also, it's a play. And because it's natural color, you never know what's going to happen. You never know what's going to be the end result and how that's going to then influence your designs. Because if you have a different color, you again have different options, different type of color combinations that you can be using. Of course, because I do think when I Look at your color. Your design. Color is. It's important to your design, even if you let it to be inherent to natural pigments and also the material. When I look at your design, color is definitely a big part of what you do.

Fernando Laposse: Yeah, of course. I mean, I am Mexican, after all. You know, I'm not going to be doing black stuff. No, yeah, color. Color is. I mean, color brings joy. Color brings. You know, we were talking about vibrancy is like it. You know, the colors that I use are. Our colors are uplifting. But, you know, the limitations of working with natural colors also limits the range of how vibrant I can go, you know, and so they're pinks, but they're never going to be, like, electric pinks, you know, and. And they're not. So. So it's actually really nice when I'm in my studio and I walk into. Into it and. And it's all, you know, it's. Because also, it's about what you combine it with. So I like to use, you know, raw wood and. And, you know, natural textiles and things like this. So. So it's like you start to get into a material and color palette that is full of color, but that is very soothing, very calming, relaxing. It's never color. I mean, colors. Sometimes I find Mexican interiors and Mexican colors actually to be a little bit too much. You know, it's. It can be. There's a lot going on. It's a lot going on. So I like. I. And my. My color palette, once you have it in final form, has this sort of tranquility. Not so much because I thought about it that way, but because that's the way color, natural color works. You know, you're never going to be. I think we've. I think it's almost like we've been. You know, it's a bit like cooking. Like, we've been. We've been expecting things that are so sugary because all of a sudden we. We could have all these abundance of artificial flavoring and sugar and all that stuff, you know, that, you know, a lot of chefs kind of complain about, like, people expect this, and dessert is like, in, like, insane amount of sugar. And I feel the same applies to color. We, through synthetic dyes and through synthetic materials and plastics and stuff, we've kind of accustomed our eyes to, I mean, such intensity of color that I think sometimes, you know, by going back to, you know, even in nature, I mean, you see a plant, and besides certain flowers and things like that, you rarely see this sort of punchy colors and Fluorescent colors and things like that.

Judith van Vliet: Bougainville is common in Mexico and that actually is. It's funny if that's a pigment or actually that flower is so flashy and so pink that even in, let's say in the chemical process we can hardly get it. Like there's almost no pigment with which we can get that. So bright pink. I think the closest you can get is the rose Mexicano Luis Barracan colors with that, with the purple combination. That's like what the hottest you can get without adding fluorescence. But it's. No, it's interesting.

Fernando Laposse: Yes.

Judith van Vliet: When I talk to people about color, they always think it needs to be bright. Color can be very soothing. It can be very. Yeah, some certain colors that can be neutral. And especially in your case, you combine them with so many different materials. It's not one color. It's so many colors together.

Fernando Laposse: Well, and I mean, speaking of flowers and bougainvilleas, I mean we also have the jacarandas, you know, which are not from here, but they were imported from Brazil. But you know, it's the kind of the emblem of Mexico City or sort of like our cherry blossom, you know, the whole city becomes. Becomes purple. But these verse of color are temporary. You know, there's seasonality to it. Even if you're walking and all of a sudden you see a bougainvillea, you know, that could be your color fix of the day. I mean, I'm thinking if we were kind of, you know, pre 19, 20th century. And I'm thinking that's why, you know, that's why if you, if you look at the poetry of the 1800s and stuff, there's. There's so much kind of fascination for this flowering thing because it would be, I mean, and you being Dutch in the tulips is another great example, you know, of like, almost like. I mean, as far as I'm aware, there was even like. Like an economic boom and then crabs because of tulips almost being used as currency, you know, so there was, there was this obsession because it was a rare thing to come across this hyper intense colors which exist in nature, but you're not seeing them all the time.

Judith van Vliet: You can't have the money constantly. It will drive you probably crazy.

Fernando Laposse: Exactly, exactly. But we do these things now with synthetic dyes. So it's like, I think for me, go back to what I was saying. It's like the limitations of the vibrancy that you can achieve with natural materials immediately kind of sets you within a level of vibration that will never be above something, you know, and to me, that brings me a lot of calmness and peace and sort of pause, you know, when I'm surrounded by objects that have this kind of commonality and how bright they can be.

Judith van Vliet: One last question. So then the one morning you wake up in a dream world. What does your dream world look like?

Fernando Laposse: I mean, like I said, I think, like I said earlier, I think, you know, thinking about the climate crisis, that that's my main anguish. And I think it's. It's something that is becoming more and more prevailing, especially with young people, you know, this sort of anxiety induced by the grim outlook and to where the world is going in terms of the environmental crisis. I mean, now perhaps even overshadowed by the state of war that we are living in all over the place. But I think those two things are connected. You know, it's. It's about. It's about this kind of lack of humanity. You know, there's this concept now that a lot of people are floating around about this idea of abandoning human centered design to favoring nature centered design, which sounds very kind of poetic and stuff, but the problems that we're facing are human problems. You know, the environmental crisis is a human crisis. The inequality crisis is a human crisis. War is a human crisis. So I think my dream world will be, yeah, waking up one day where we can really kind of respect each other, love each other. And if we learn how to love each other, we're going to learn how to love nature and we're going to learn how to love, you know, this amazing planet that has given us so much abundance and joy. So I think that would be my dream world, and it will be a colorful world, of course.

Judith van Vliet: Well, hopefully this colorful podcast is going to contribute a little bit to that dream of yours. And I think it's a dream that I definitely share and many of us hopefully share. So I really want to thank you, Fernando, for all the wonderful information, for sharing again your world with our listeners. Gracias. I hope you enjoyed this last episode. If you are a fan of the Color Authority podcast, please let us know by reviewing and rating our show on whichever platform you're listening on. The next episode is coming out next month, and in the meantime, I'm wishing you a wonderful, colorful day.