 Super Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. A middle-aged woman with light skin tone and black hair, Gloria Cortina stands looking at the camera in the middle of a gallery with pink and red cochineal dyed wallpaper. So in English it's cochineal and in Spanish it's grana cochinilla. Nature by Design, cochineal, Gloria Cortina. Hi, I'm Gloria Cortina. I am a Mexican designer. I work with indigenous concepts and culture from Mexico fusing it into contemporary design. A close-up shot of a hand grabbing a cochineal insect often a fall cactus is shown. The cochinilla, it's a beetle, it's an actual insect that it's molido. A woman kneels on the ground in front of a matate. She spreads cochineal bugs on the slope surface using the mono to ground the cochineal into a fine red powder. And then you dilute it with different solutions and you can get different, let's say, dyes. Next, a bowl containing cochineal dye is poured into a stone bowl. The cochinilla is mainly found in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. And from this area of the world it just became incredibly powerful for dyes, for artists, for even food, right? A detail of a page from the Codex Zuchinutal, a pictographic history and genealogical record from the Mixtec region of Mexico is shown. A 17th to 18th century Peruvian mantle is shown. It has bands of geometric patterns and floral vegetation in red, orange, yellow, teal, and green. And in Mexico, Gran Cochinilla is a concept that we use not only in textiles, but we also, it's a very folkloric color and a very folkloric, it's part of our culture. The idea behind this map is that we wanted to capture cochinilla trails. Via Cortina sitting on the floor measuring twine is shown. Cortina stands on a ladder next to a wall with the map of the world. She uses the twine to connect various locations. The trails is how the pigment went from country to country and how, for example, from America it went into Europe and then went down to Africa. Africa came to Europe and then it went to India and all the way around. So it has a lot of tenacity. And in a way it's a very coveted pigment. A photograph of the gallery with the map Cortina created on the wall is shown next. Stylized depictions to the continents have varying lengths of twine connecting locations. A formal map of cochinilla's trade routes is shown next. Doing this wallpaper we worked with, Holland and Sherry. A close-up shot of the cochinilla wallpaper, reminiscent of watercolors with broad horizontal strokes of pink, magenta, and purple is shown. A photo of a panel of cochinilla wallpaper created by Gloria Cortina titled Movement is shown next. The first idea that I wanted to conceive was to treat granicocchinilla as a watercolor. Multiple strokes of the watercolor like cochinilla dye painted on a white sheet of paper is shown. The large reddish-purple streaks overlap in opaque intersections. So we only diluted the pigment, the little bugs were crushed, you diluted with water and then we started working in different strokes to open up all the different hues that the gran has. Cortina stands in the Holland and Sherry studio with cochinilla dye in one hand and a flat wide paintbrush in the other. People watch as she carefully drags the paintbrush across the paper, weaving behind a red stroke. She tries again with a wider paintbrush, moving the brush across the paper in a wavy pattern. The stroke is dark red at the bottom, transitioning to light pink at the top. So when we started the installation as it's an organic material, when the glue was on the back panel and we started installing it, the granicocchinilla turned gray. In the museum gallery, someone measures a panel of cochinilla wallpaper with a measuring stick. A man with a tool belt unrolls the cochinilla wallpaper and positions it on the wall, aligning it with a laser level. And so we panicked a little bit, but there's a saying in Mexico that when something, you know, it's foreign to the cochinilla, it hits the pigment. People in Mexico say that the cochinilla gets really sensitive and it starts crying. So I told all the curators, let's be patient. The weekend passed and then suddenly the color just came back again. A pan of the gallery is shown next. Cochinilla wallpaper covers every wall. On the right is Cortina's other cochinilla piece, a console table, covered in deep red cochinilla lacquer. To its left on the wall is the cochinilla trail's map.