 Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Nature by Design, Cochinil, Marisol Centeno. A young woman with medium skin tone and braided pigtails, Marisol Centeno sits in the middle of the screen, facing the camera, flanked on both sides by colorful pattern textiles. I'm Marisol Centeno. I live in Mexico City and my great passion is textile. I'm the Creative Director of BYU. It's a brand specialized in the design and production of tapettés. Centeno walks down a long corridor to her studio. She wears a face mask and backpack. She unlocks the door and steps into her sunlit studio. Corkboard with various textile experiments and colorful sketches of flowers and various patterns are shown. And on the other hand, I'm Creative Director of my studio where it's like a laboratory where we do textile research. Centeno pulls out a container of woven samples on a shelf lined with thread and other accoutrement. At a table covered in spools of pink thread, she folds the sample she just took from the shelf. Well, as a designer, it's important to question the role of design in the contemporary context, especially in my country. And a gap between my work with BYU and my studio projects is to ask ourselves how design can be used as a tool for social impact. That's why I think that for me, using responsible processes in the creation of my textiles is quite important. On the other hand, I'm passionate about discovering the stories and processes within the everyday objects and the strong relationship they have with the everyday rituals of the human being. I think it's a way of discovering identity, the culture and the needs of the people. Video of a man with an axe chopping wood. A person grounds cochineal bugs on a metate with a mano. We see a large pot or cauldron sitting over a fire. In the pot are threads sitting in a vat of dye. Someone pours powder into a pot over a fire. A person stirs the pot with a large stick. The string in the red dye is pushed back and forth. A man lifts the bundle of string out of the dye. He hangs it above the pot to dry. Centeno stands with her back to the camera, with her arms held above her head. She opens and closes an origami-like woven textile. Centeno holds a large accordion-weaved textile and yo-yos it in front of her. We see Centeno weaving on a large loom. We see Centeno weaving on a large loom. Centeno pours cochineal bugs out of a glass jar into a small ceramic bowl. Using a pestle and mortar, she grounds the bugs into a fine red powder. Centeno pours cochineal bugs out of a glass jar into a small ceramic bowl. Using a pestle and mortar, she grounds the bugs into a fine red powder. We pan over bundles of thread and shades ranging from red to pink to magenta. Centeno dunks a piece of white thread into a pot of cochineal dye on a hot plate in her studio. She ties it to the handle of the pot to soak and stirs it with a pair of tongs. I like spontaneity and I always enjoy it. It speaks of nature, which is perfect, but there is no structure within it that man tends to do with respect to beauty. I love that. On the other hand, I have a very personal relationship with color. I like to think that textiles can lead to these experiences and beautiful sensations through color. And the grain is an absolute sample of how color can be so sophisticated and so beautiful or luxurious. I think it's an incredible pigment. Centeno unties the thread and takes the dyed threads out of the pot letting the excess dye drain off. We see a close-up shot of the dyed cochineal threads. Each bundle of thread is labeled with a name and percentage of cochineal and fixative. When I was invited to the museum to work around the grain, I started to work on color themes. And I came up with this question of how men could see or perceive this theme of beauty. And I think that vision of color is one of the things that men have in their lives. We see Centeno in the corner of her studio on her computer looking at digital sketches. This is the great cochineal. And there was a chemical behind it. For me, it was to enhance the purity of color and make it purer than the chemical itself. So I got involved in this molecular research. And from there, I generated a whole process of formulas to generate reactions from the pH of the pigment. And through that, I made this color extractor. A sheet of paper with names, measurements, color name, and dye time, along with tiny samples of dyed thread, sits on a table. Sketch of Centeno's chemistry inspired wall hanging. It appears to be colored using magenta, red, orange, pink, and purple colored pencils. And that's why the name came up. It's H22C20O13, which is basically carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The wall hanging is rectangular like a runner rug. On the top and bottom are four rectangles of color, magenta, pink, and orange. The main portion of the wall hanging is purple, covered in overlapping magenta hexagon outlines. The shapes created by the overlapping hexagons are filled in with the same color as the rectangles at the top and bottom of the wall hanging.