 Alright, welcome to Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's National Design Week and welcome to the masterclass with Rebecca Mendes. My name is Michelle Chang and I'm here as general support, so if you need anything please let me know. Launched in 2006, National Design Week is held each year in conjunction with the National Design Awards program. During National Design Week, Cooper Hewitt hosts a series of free education programs centered around the vision and work of the National Design Award winners. Our National Design Awards programming is made possible by generous support from Target and additional support is provided by Adobe. Funding is also provided by Design Within Reach, Altman Foundation, Facebook, Edward and Helen Hintz, and Siegel Family Endowment. And we have received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center. We hope that you join us this evening as well for our networking reception from 6 to 8 p.m. that will be upstairs in the Great Hall. The event is actually complimentary with your ticket for your registration for this particular program, so we hope we see you later at 6 p.m. And I'd like to welcome Rebecca Mendes to join us on stage and then the flow of the program will be a talk down here. We'll get to see the galleries with Rebecca and then we'll come back here for any question and answer and conversation. So I hope you enjoy. Hi everyone, welcome, welcome. I hope you're doing great, learning, learning a lot of things. That's always an amazing thing. I think my talk is usually about an hour, maybe even more, but I'm going to squeeze it into 45 minutes and see if I might skip a few projects. But if you have questions about those projects, then let me know. I'll just skip through the slides. But I'll start by just saying that I am an artist, a designer and a creative director and I teach at UCLA Design Media Arts Department. Where I also run the Counterforce Lab and we'll talk a little bit at the end on that. Many of us, I'm sure, consider ourselves as storytellers, even myth makers, and we all know that origin stories are powerful. We need as humans to understand who we are, where we came from and to place ourselves in stories in history and in time. My story and interest in social and environmental issues, and issues about time, because it's definitely what you'll see in my work, begins in Mexico City where I was born and raised to parents educated as chemical engineers. So they taught me to see the world from a physical chemical point of view. And they were even known to bring out the organic and inorganic tone whenever I would ask something, even just as mundane as like, you know, how does a butterfly fly? Well, that's not mundane, right? It's something that they taught me, again, to see much more how things were organized. So they instilled in me the respect for the natural world, but more importantly for the nature of matter. Its composition, organization, its behavior, cycles and systems. In other words, they taught me to see the world from its design. They fostered in me not only a sense of self-identity, but primarily a sense of self in relation to other humans, to other animals, to living things, and primarily to the environment. Hold on, that was about to start. 4K on her throat, on every part of her body. And she says like, you know, you do not want to see any human being so much. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to get a 16 millimeter camera instead. Because I want gestures. I want to see the way that my eyes see in a poetic way and not necessarily the description and specificity of things. So, you know, when I was very young, I kept asking myself, you know, why is it that phenomena behaves in a certain way? What are the essential mechanisms of nature? And with these questions I created at any given moment, which consists about six works. And this series explores issues of perception, specifically of technologically mediated nature. We know that we move more and more into experiencing the world through technology. So how is it that I can bring the force of life through something that it is digital? And of course light and vibration is what we are. So why not something like this can convey those aspects of life? And this is the way that I like exhibiting this at architectural scale. And it adapts to the space. So in this case you see that it was definitely had to stretch to be able to accommodate that unusual space. But they usually are a video projection. And in some cases I put a material in front of it. And you'll see the composer I work with is Druschnur. And he is currently also composing another project of mine. But one of the things that I try to do is to kind of create this immersive spaces to have a full embodied experience. This is Detifos, considered the largest waterfall of all Europe located in central Iceland. And what I look at is that I choose to do this large scale projections that, you know, they get exhibited sometimes 22 feet by 13 feet. So you are very close to the space so that you feel that engulfing force. And then the meditative recurring cycles perhaps you enter in relation to the rhythms of the waterfall itself. And it can end up in a kind of seemingly mutual modulation. Composer Carl Heinz Stockhausen said, we are transistors in the literal sense. People always think they are in the world, but they never realize they are the world. What Stockhausen means is that there are no phenomena. And I'm going to rattle every light bulb that is in here. That usually I get, I need a good subwoofer. What Stockhausen means is that there are no phenomena in the natural world that do not manifest like vibratory or rhythmic phenomena. Everything is vibratory and rhythmic phenomena. And therefore these modulations attack us, they change us and in the end become us. So again I create this large scale immersive installations of video sound and matter for a fully embodied experience. This is what I call the at any given moment full one with volcanic rock. I have about one ton of lava rock and gravel. One of the interesting things about this work and you can barely see the lava. I think that we're having a bit too much light here. Can we lower the lights? Can we put them for presentation? Thank you. And it was that I started rationally moving all the lava in order for me to understand how to create a kind of natural environment. And it was not working. Nothing that I was doing was working. And in despair and with tears in my eyes after 12 hours of trying I started throwing them with all my force. And that's when I realized that gravity was telling me where things needed to go. And that I should allow matter to move through how it is moved in nature. So it really was a shift between my rational mind into much more my senses and be able to understand that irrational. With my work I seek to create a place for the repose of the soul. And I was very happy when the director of the gallery said that people were coming in and spending 10 minutes, half an hour. Some even brought their lunch, their tea because they found that this place was a very meditative space. And this is at any given moment grass too, it burned wood. And this was in Pasadena in the Williamson Gallery and Buckley Canyon had just burned. So it made sense to put something local of an element that was very much what it could perhaps become. 20th century philosopher Henry Bergson has had a profound influence in my life and work. He believed that time was neither a real homogeneous medium nor a mental construct but possesses what he referred to as duration. Duration in Bergson's view was creativity and memory as an essential component of reality. So at the core I've done so much of my work to be able to think in terms of time rather than space. We are so used to thinking in terms of space, rational space. So to think in time we then begin to think much more of the idea of the event. And that things happen, not only things exist and are. He said, Bergson said that being therefore my identity, who I am, resides in the past and in the present there is pure becoming. And that very instant of becoming is the present moment, the moment of action, the moment of the creative act and of change, of chance and of intuition. My family spent many of our summer vacations in the jungles of Mexico. We would camp sometimes, you know, two months, a month and a half. In a specific site, archaeology was my father's passion. So this is, for example, in Piedras Negras, which is a great gate in Mayan. And this is the first photograph I shot with my first serious camera. But my father taught me everything that he knew about the Maya. He was in the round table of Palenque trying to decipher the glyphs during that time. And, you know, he spoke to me about time, about their calendars. But he also taught me about how, I hear you see Chuck, the god of the rain in there. How the idea of the calendars, because there were three calendars that the Maya used and they were always interconnected in these three cycles. So the complexity of time was really, really powerful. What is mind bending is that we do not know how and why their calendars incorporate dates of billions of years. A katun consists of 20 tuns, about 19.7 years. A bak tun of 20 katuns, about 394 years, and goes on and on with the tunes, right? But there is the halba tun that is about 1.26 billion years. The idea that they could calculate ahead 1.26 billion years was uncanny. It's incredible. Sometimes we're able to camp among the Mayan temples, including Ushmal shown here, surrounded by powerful iconography. This is a drawing by Frederick Catherwood, who in 1839 traveled to Mesoamerica with writer John Lloyd Stevens. Catherwood was trained as an architect, so he began creating the detailed visual evidence of the intricate carvings and structures that you see here. So with charcoal from our fire, my father would bring paper and we would start doing rubbings. There, if you think about it, it's exactly where my fascination with this symbolic storytelling came from. And so I think that that is these kinds of stories. And even my father taught me that Catherwood used the camera lucida to be able to make these drawings. So technology, photography, symbolism, and of course I'm a designer, right? So it was bound to happen and an artist. So all of these formed me as a designer, artist, and earth protector. When I am in the field, I patiently observe and listen and wait. Sometimes, you know, I wait until the known becomes unknown. What does that mean? It is when nature suddenly performs differently so that I am so used to a certain kind of fog to come in. But sometimes I find myself in Iceland at four in the morning waiting for nature to perform differently. So that perhaps I get much more acclimated to see, again, nature again. And I focus a lot on the horizon line. So I created Nothing Further Happens, a single channel video all captured in 16 millimeter film. And it's, you know, tele-seen it to HD video and projected at architectural scale. And I know that I... No, it's good, I think. Yeah. With this work, I began exploring the concept of the feeling of the sublime. Emanuel Kant said that the sublime is not so much a formal quality of some natural phenomenon, but more a conception, something that happens in the mind as an experience of limits. In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, German philosopher Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. Where the fullest feeling of the sublime was an experience of the immensity of the universe's extend and duration. And that there was pleasure from the knowledge of the observer's nothingness and oneness with nature. Well philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that the sublime expresses the edges of our conceptual powers and reveals the multiplicity and the instability of our post-modern world. The other thing that you see in this work is, and I'm going to move fast, but I was exploring the idea of the materiality of the film where I would force the light. I would force it so that the film itself would begin to disintegrate. In this idea philosopher David Bart Schwartz writes about this work in his book, Stranges Thing, an Introduction to Electronic Art through the Teachings of Lacan, where he explores the limits between works of new media and psychoanalysis. And it is about how we process what we see, touch, imagine and remember. So he starts looking at specifically what you were just looking about, this oscillation of the material. And he starts seeing that rather than you seeing the actual landscape, you seeing looking at looking. And it is like the signifiers which are, is the materiality, the film itself, backfires. So that at some point you cannot even penetrate into the subject matter. And that was a meditation on the materiality of the work. He calls it the glitch. So here it's like, you know, he sees how the subject matter is in a certain state and then it loses, you know, with the light it then settles into the normal. So again, it's the agency of the apparatus that I'm exploring. If you think about our lives, think about everything you control. We control so much that in a way, in a sense, that control begins to overpower even our own experience in the world. So I wanted to be able to let go. And, you know, getting my 16 millimeter camera, a crank camera that is 70 years old, I began to have my cameras, my co-author. And so this idea of the mechanism of chance being introduced by the camera itself that results in this radiant, chroma-flots intensifying by your regular flickering, it's something I could not necessarily think about it. It's something that it gave me. So I really began enjoying very, very much working with my camera as my co-author. So things like this, that, you know, I could not necessarily force it, but I knew that most often than not, it would give me incredible variation. So with these, I created various projects that are called Never Happened Again. That's because usually I would get to a natural place and I would say, okay, look at that, look at that, tripod, camera, everything, and it's gone. And it's gone. And I would wait five hours, six hours, 12 hours. No, it will never happen again. So I really kind of learned to let go of some of these incredible moments. Sometimes I take frames like this of the 16 millimeter and then I enlarge it and I make prints that are about maybe 100 inches wide. And it just begins to kind of, again, speak about this materiality. They are printed in archival paper. And then this one is an exploration of the, you know, the idea of surrendering to this spatial infinity. This is a photographic series called Weatherscapes. And I'm studying the numbing phenomenon of light and void that places us at the edge of amorphous infinites. And what I'm most interested is in this idea of the infinity, infinity of time that changes ever so slowly or slightly. And to be able to witness that is quite beautiful. It's a kind of near nothingness that allows me for me to, again, acclimate to perceive more precisely. What is interesting about this whole thing is that sometimes you have found yourself like in the desert that there's nothing. And the infinity, that line that fell to me in the previous work, like nothingness, right? The infinity that it is sublime. When I am dealing with fog, it's only like a cocoon that makes it intimate. So it's strange to think of this space as intimate, right? But even my voice and everything sound how it travels becomes intimate. And I know I'm going to need to speed up because I'm already using a lot of my time. I've created a lot of work around eyes. I am fascinated by its nomenclature, its organization, how it is named according to how it looks and how it functions. So Stephen Payne, and I've done, you know, from prints to books to soundpieces, in his book Stephen Payne called The Eyes, a journey into Antarctica, he writes, out of simple ice crystals, it's constructed a vast hierarchy of ice masses as ice terrains and ice structures. These higher order ice forms collectively compose the entire continent. One of the things that Psy did was basically reciting the names of the icebergs. Tabular Bergs, Glacier Bergs, Ice Islands, Bergy Bits, Growlers, Brash Ice, White Ice, Blue Ice, Green Ice, Dirty Ice, the Sea Isis, Pack Ice, Ice Flows, Ice Rinds, Ice Hammocks, Ice Riges, Ice Flowers, and it goes on and it goes on the way that we name and we name nature. My art practice is what is known as artistic fieldwork practice which borrows methods from various disciplines, from geology to environmental science to graphic design and merges the apparent objectivity of the scientific research process with this objective, more flexible approach, drawing on multiple methodologies and discourses. So in the end what I have learned after doing design and doing all of these different fields is that what I like is merging them all together. So this idea of the artistic fieldwork in which all of our process, while we produce it can be from a book, from a film to a poem to a haiku to anything is how I have found that that is my territory, that's where I want to exist. And I am so behind, so I'm going to actually skip this. This was about, again, one of the examples of the artistic fieldwork that I went to Svalbard but I'm going to skip that. This was the location, you know, 592 miles from the North Pole, my equipment, some of the photographs that I took of the northernmost settlement in all the world, even above Siberia. This is Niali Sund, and where sometimes only 35 people live. In order of this you can have some trappers. But I am fascinated in the way that we adapt to live in these incredible environments. This is all my photographic series, and I'm going to go fast, forgive me. Barentsburg, another settlement, but settled by the Russians, that they still want to have a footing there, even though they can barely keep about 200 people, it's a coal mine and too many accidents. It doesn't make any sense. And then... Yes, exactly, oh yeah. But that's exactly what this next piece is about. Due to climate change, the Arctic Ocean summer ice cover is now half of what it used to be 50 years ago, and I believe today is more like a quarter. Because of this, many countries are looking at the Arctic with new interests. In 2007, a mini submarine carrying Arthur Chillingarov, a Russian parliamentarian and veteran explorer, descended into the ice-covered sea at the North Pole, extended a robotic arm and planted a Russian flag at the sea floor, knowing that all of that is going to be melted and what I want is the bottom. So, El Norte is my critique of the prevailing 15th century colonial attitude that still continues to be very, very strong, and in particular its relation to the current geopolitics of the North Pole. El Norte, my feudal conquest of the North Pole for my country, Mexico, do we care? We don't care about the North Pole. But it was something about just the idea of thinking, of still the idea of migrating to the North for a better life. So, it is that kind of difference between the reality and the illusion, because life ends up being very hard. So, what ends up happening is that, let me see if I can actually speed this up. I might be able to, because I want you to see the trajectory, because I keep on walking, maybe there. All right, and I will plant my flag. It's mine for Kilkenny, right? So, what was interesting for me is that, because I had to go from this very large vessel, that it was a 100-year-old, you know, ice-class sailboat, into a dinghy, into a small inflatable vessel to go to land, they would tell us, if you fall, you will live, if we leave you in the water, you live for six minutes. If it would take you out, you will live for three minutes. So, my flag had to be in two parts, and I did not know that was going to happen, but it just made the peace. It was so much better. So, the journey as a medium in itself, I mean, for me, it's like that. Being there is what matters. And from that, I have done many different works about walking, that I'm going to skip through them. This was in Chile, then this was in Svalbard as well, in which is the migration of the human, as the migration of the birds happens on the back, but I'm going to skip this one. I'm going to go into walking. Walking the earth is where I film myself walking the horizon line. This work is a long-term project, which will continue. I will continue to capture until I die, until I want to see myself being, you know, 90-something, with my little cane, and still going through all my horizon lines, because it's, to me, it's the most poetic thing to walk the earth. French philosopher Michel de Certeaux argued that the practice of walking is analogous to the speech act, and can also be understood to create a kind of spacing or syntax in relation to how things are encountered. Walking and travel are described as a form of enunciation that carries the possibility of breathing life, introducing a temporal beat or narrative. So, Consolar Migration 3 is a contemplation of migratory birds, and you will see... So, for me, the idea was to try to defamiliarize the landscape and migration by turning it on its side, so that perhaps we can see the code of migration through just figuring out the animals in that way. And I'm going to move to the next one. You can experience a little bit of these upstairs in the exhibition. And that's the way that I like exhibiting this work. Large scale, and for you to get that very immersive space. As an immigrant myself, I'm interested in issues of migration, of animals and of humans. And so this work is something that you have upstairs, and you definitely can experience it. It's a 29-minute video, and I hope you can sit at least for a few minutes there. But, you know, we all established a periodic migratory period. It's a period of migratory patterns in our lives. So it's a little bit of seeing ourselves a little bit in the way that animals see themselves. Let me go through this. First time I said the Arctic turn, and then the piece that it is upstairs. But it is one of those things that, to me, I'm fascinated by the bird's flight. It is about 60,000 kilometers a year when it goes from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again. That's the migration ever recorded. And this idea of the migration is what my project, Circom Solar, will follow. I will follow that trajectory. I have done a lot of research in the north where it nests, and Circom Solar Migration 1 upstairs comes from that. And I've applied to the National Science Foundation to go to Antarctica, and they've liked the project very much, but Palmer Station is where I need to go, and there are only nine spots. And the scientists are not leaving. I want them to leave. I want them to leave so I can go there. But the way that we learned this, it was basically by being able to chip 50 birds and only 11 came back. They are so tiny. Only four ounces is the bird. They made for life. They go back to where they nest, so they knew that they could perhaps catch them. And from that, I learned that 90% of the chicks are dying. I was out of a starvation. I worked with an ornithologist in Iceland, and she said that the waters around Iceland are warming up. And due to that, the mackerel is migrating sooner, eating the sand eel, which is the only little fish that the Arctic turn, the puffin, so many of the seabirds can eat. And therefore, the Arctic turn is like the cannery in the coalmine. But seabirds are all suffering, and we really will be seeing, you know, again, talking about the extinction. I know that with the Arctic turn, it's becoming very, very difficult for them to survive. So with these, I created this work again. And I'm going to skip through this. I got all kinds of wonderful stories in Riff. We were called like the Krija folk. Krija is in Icelandic. But we got stories of people's relationship to birds. And I'm making a book based on that. And I'm very excited. Of course, many of all of them translated. This is how the work was exhibited in 2013 at GLO, a light festival in Santa Monica. More photos of that. I'm going to skip the making of it. And again, the work, you will be able to see it up there. I want very quickly to show you a Metro Art Commission based on my recording of One Day in Los Angeles. The sky is democratic. Everyone sees the same thing. You go in the Metro and you see the same thing. The subway and the sky are the one democratic thing. I was inspired by this code from the time and date of the astronomy in Los Angeles. And I created 15 minutes, divided 15 minutes of the entire day of Los Angeles, creating this work. It's called At the Same Time. And it is a commission for Metro. It's 100 feet, and it is recreated with Smalty Mosaic. And these are the tortas of glass. This is being fabricated. Actually, it's just finished. It's finished made out of the glass. And to be able to arrive at all of these different values and colors, they cut them very small. They make the mosaic. This is what I've been approving for the last year and a half. And this is the mural. This is at when I'm doing the dry fit. The dry fit is when it arrives from the fabricators and then you extend it to make sure that it is my mural. I give it the approval with a humongous smile because this was overwhelming for me as well. And this is the composite with the tile. And I know I have very little time, but I was inspired by... I don't know if you heard of the Harrison's, Eleanor Newton Harrison. I designed a book for them. That still, it kind of its own hold because Eleanor unfortunately died. But they were considered the first eco artists in which they said that the Earth is their client. And they followed everything around the idea of the Earth's principles. Nature has agency. Nature has no waste. Nature creates itself continually through processes of exchange. Nature mostly stores excesses of energy in various forms of carbon. So here I burned the cover, right? So you can get a sense of the carbon. Anyway, I was so inspired by them and the whole idea of posthumanism that then I created my counterforce lab. And my counterforce lab is a research and fieldwork studio based in design media arts department at UCLA, which is dedicated to using art and design to develop creative collaborations, new fields of study and methods to research, create and execute projects that investigate the social and ecological concerns of the Anthropocene era. And more exactly moving towards the Thulocene era where we are worlding together, connected and trying to get ourselves out of this mess, not only speaking about what we have done. So many projects that have come out of the counterforce lab, I can perhaps talk to you in detail in the question and answer program. But we are connected, for example, here in Marfa, the idea of public art and the environment. And here my students of winter 2016, they were investigating the idea of our treatment to animals. And in order for them to propel and to really make that even stronger, they created a second citizens that they called the Hamuns, that they were being bred for consumption. So just the same way that we breed animals for consumption. So it was the idea of cannibalism. So some things like that, we ask big questions around the Anthropocene era about climate change. There was another project that just happened in the fall of last year that was migration from Mexico to the United States because of environmental reasons. And people don't think about that. But so many things from too many golf courses in Arizona has made the Colorado River not go all the way to the Sea of Cortez, making all the fishing villages to disappear and have to migrate. Things like that that we do not know in relation to animals that are not so known. And so more projects around there. And then one last project that it was for the AIGA that I did, it's a project called I Am Many. And I wanted to speak about the idea of humans in relation to animals, which was really the precursor to the exhibition that you will see above. But it was the idea that we are in our body. We are everything. Bacteria as a virus, as plants, and only 10% of the human genome is actually human. And so Donna Haraway writes, I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only 10% of all the cells that occupy my body. The other 90% of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protests, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary for my being alive at all. And some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, the rest of us, no harm. And I love this. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions. To be one is always to be one with many. And this is the making of that piece, my first time working in porcelain. And I think the only thing I'm going to close is that, as storytellers, we have the opportunity to change the conversation, to tell a story of self in relation, but not only at a planetary scale, but within the history of the universe. What American historian David Christian calls big history. In a 13.8 billion year history of the universe, humans have only existed in the world for 200,000 years. These represents the last millimeter of the last sheet in a 400 sheet toilet paper roll. Isn't that beautiful to have that? That was a wonderful scientist that said that and I forgot her name. I should know it. As long as we don't have a sense of big history, it will be very hard to understand ourselves as humans and that we have urgent problems that we need to solve together. This is the time when circumstances are calling on everyone to engage and I believe that we, as creative thinkers and communicators, must respond in the face of prejudice, find our voice and make an especially powerful contribution to a better society and a healthy planet. Gracias. So I don't know if questions go now or if we have even time for that, yeah? Later. Okay, later. So at this point we'd like to make our way upstairs. So before Rebecca gets started in talking a little bit more about this exhibition, I'll just give you a bit of background. My name is Cristina de León. I'm the Associate Curator of La Viva Design here at Cooper Q. We are working on building a collection of La Viva Design but the way I think that we're thinking about it is in a much more transnational sense, saying that designers from Latin America, designers from the United States, whose origins are from other Latin American countries, designers from throughout the world, they are influenced by so many different things, by their travels, by the people they encounter and even the idea of migration and the way someone enters a country from somewhere else, how that journey influences their work is really important. And so as we are working on building a collection and when we decided to invite Rebecca, it ended up being sort of the perfect journey for us because we don't have a collection to say like, well, here is a hundred objects created by Latino designers and I don't think Rebecca would have thought of an exhibition just focused on designers from Latin America and so what I think we're showing here and what was done so beautifully is that Rebecca really wanted to focus on a story that was very much rooted in her Mexican history and her upbringing and we've done that and I'll let Rebecca talk a little bit more about it but we've done that but through objects from what is essentially all over the world and in doing that we show that museums and collections in general can tell stories that are different, that are not always the same and we can do it in really interesting and dynamic ways. So Lex is an ongoing series that Rebecca has been doing for many, many years. The premise of it is that we invite a designer and architect, someone who is very known in sort of the entertainment or cultural field to mine our collections with over 200,000 objects. This exhibition is quite different because we have all this from our collection and we have also used objects from the National Museum of Natural History bird division, just something for who it has never done before and very apropos to what Rebecca does which is looking at how design, nature, culture our personal influences sort of all come together in various ways I think is what sort of radiates in this exhibition. So it's quite different in the best way I think and I'll start by saying that when we first invited Rebecca she said, I'm so excited and I'm so terrified and we had a conversation she said I'm thinking about animals and then I didn't hear from Rebecca for like four months. I went underground. I said, what kind of animals? From where? Where do we go? It's so funny when I'm seeing Rebecca talk about her projects and you can see how immersed she gets into them and she just kept saying, I'm not ready yet I've got so many other things and I'm not ready to immerse myself yet and it was so true because once she was ready she just went full in and then the email started and the first email was just images of a jaguar a polar bear something called a fissoline which is an extinct animal which is something across from a dog and a kangaroo sort of the size of a large dog but it has a pouch in its back and a long sort of kangaroo tail and Martha the passenger pigeon which is the last species of the passenger pigeon to die which is also in the National Museum of Natural History's collection so essentially all of the stars in the museum that I said, Rebecca, probably not I will try and it was a strong no but the chief curator of the bird's division said, well we're open to birds it just can't be the most famous bird Martha the passenger pigeon and the last to die of its kind so let's think about it but we're open to it and then Rebecca started to talk about and I'll let you talk about the story of Moctezuma and the aviaries and that's kind of how the whole story came together sort of thinking about Plan B which actually ended up being I think the best plan and what many visitors don't know is that the exhibitions that we show are not always Plan A they're often Plan B, C, sometimes D sometimes E and that's part of the process that's part of the process as curators but it's also the process of the designer of the artist, of the creators that come in and try to make sense of what we have or try to make sense of what they want to show from their own work and so I'll let Rebecca start with when she thought about the sort of nucleus of the show Thank you Cristina it has been to me one of the most incredible experiences working with you and working with the museum because yes I was terrified because I would go down into all of the different collections there were so many choices right so much and I was overwhelmed and of course you know I ended up with like a a kid going into a candy store a little bit of everything and then when I wanted my Jaguar and I wanted my Disneyland and I wanted all of these it was because of course I wanted to work with the idea of post-humanism and extinction so when that shifted and when I was okay I can't have all of those but it narrowed then to the story and I was I had read the story of when Hernán Cortés comes to Tenochtitlan you know first he's in Aztapalapa and then you know he's fascinated by the cities where I came to this story but anyway that that refines it so I'm going to start with that story because I'm reading as I am cooking what else do I do with this show and I'm reading and I'm reading I read this whole book and suddenly it's like I'm going to reread this part and it is a book by Barry Lopez and it is called Crossing Open Ground he's someone that speaks beautifully about you know the experience with the natural world and speaks about the importance of a naturalist to be in you know in every kind of institution and so it's the story when Hernán Cortés after you know he arrives he sees the new world everything has been recorded by Bernal Diaz del Castillo in one of the true story of the of the Americas and you know Moctezuma Segundo realizes the dubious intentions of Hernán Cortés and says you know what leave and so leaves but already is recorded that the soldiers and everyone had said that it's the most beautiful city they have ever seen Tenochtitlan the most beautiful in terms of beauty but its relationship to nature its canals and everything of how the relationship to animals so that record of seeing the most incredible thing 11 months later Hernán Cortés comes with incredible greed and vengeance and what he does besides starting a massacre of people is that he burns the aviaries which Moctezuma collected the most beautiful birds from all over the continent and burns them alive and the screeching of the animals is what gets recorded in the story so I wanted to make sure to start this exhibition right there because it speaks so much of the culture that was in synergy with the natural natural world and understood very much their place within it and another one that comes that all they care was you know material things extractivism and greed from there it takes us to then going you know just beginning to kind of say what happened at that moment where are the codices, where are the stories how do we begin so we have some very important information there we start with our codices here that shows the is this the Florentine maybe the codice that has the feather work a lot of the feather work that Moctezuma Segundo used the feathers of the Quetzal and also we begin to connect and that's when we end up getting from the Natural History Museum the appropriate bird so here you want to say something there were some things as Rebecca was saying birds held a very high status and as a society and culture actually tribute was paid through feathers through bird skins through birds that could be held in the aviary and all of these things were recorded but we couldn't necessarily have these codices which talked about the feather works and the story of how these feather works were produced in the exhibition because they're in very important collection really difficult so in thinking about how can we bring that to the visitor we thought of having this interactive and there are various parts of this interactive but one part is the map of the National Plan to understand where the story takes place this city was actually built on the lake of Texcoco and when Ernesto Cortez burned the city once he conquered the Aztec Empire he burned the city and then they filled it and then that is what is now known as Mexico City that's why we're sinking and if you sort of zoom in you can see how the birds held such a high status and that the Spanish were so interested in it that they actually put a place here for the aviaries so you can see within this city's makeup where the birds would have been would have been at the center very close to the center temple which is really interesting and then these are other codices that show how feathers were used for various traditional garb and this is a codex that was created which is actually a calendar of an Aztec calendar which talks about a lot of the religious holidays and has a lot of garb and you can really see how the feathers were used and then the Florentine codex which is a very large and in-depth codex that actually is made up of 12 volumes one section is only devoted to the work of feather workers essentially people who only dedicated themselves to producing these elaborate feather works and what I love about this is that you can see here how headdresses were made and how the feather workers created some of the regalia and then even here the step-by-step process yes and then again you can zoom in this is an old Spanish so really hard to read you can have a little bit more of information so the show even though it's quite small and intimate and there were things that we knew we were first talking about it we immediately said how can we get the codex season here you know I said okay we're never gonna get the codex season we're never gonna get the codex season we're never gonna get the codex season but how can we bring them into this space in a way that's interesting and a lot of my work with Grebeca was you know listening and talking and thinking about what were our main goals and how could we bring that forward to the public in a way that was arresting I mean the first thing Grebeca said to me was okay we're gonna focus on this story of behavior I want a lot of specimens but I don't want them mounted I just want one mounted bird which is the Quetzal which makes perfect sense because it was thought that the Quetzal should never be killed so if you were to to use the Quetzal feathers it had to be plucked or if it died of natural causes but you could not kill the Quetzal it was the one bird that you couldn't kill so it's mounted but every other bird is as you see laying on its back and it's what is called a study specimen so it's not meant to be on display it's really meant for scientists to use and to study the natural world and specimens are the reason why certain regulations have been passed around what kind of chemicals are used and environmental destruction so these specimens are essentially sort of the center or the heart of how conservation is done but Rebecca said I don't want the birds to look alive Yes I want them to look so dead because I want us to when we see what we have done to have bowed the ambivalence of we have killed as much as we are learning and so with that for us to understand the complexity of being human we have done horrendous things to this world to our own, to our animals so for example the most horrible piece in this show is that little hummingbird that it is a beautiful but it's a horrible in that it is half a hummingbird just of a hummingbird but at the same time that is what we have done and we have done it with incredible care, integrity of this but not necessarily the integrity of the life of the bird so that ambivalence in our lives is what we need to sustain we are both no matter how much we try to see ourselves clean we are not clean none of us so I think that this is something that in their deadness we also that out of this comes incredible understanding of the natural world out of the study out of everything we are doing in the you know for example the way that all our color system right to me that's fascinating that the Pantone color system comes from understanding these specimens from a rich way that came up with this book over there and I'm having you all move a little bit too much but to me these are the pieces that are fascinating right this book it was primarily done so that people would be able to codify the ornithology databases and to understand the birds more clearly what happens next that becomes the foundation for our color systems as we know them and that I find that that is the science part of it that that's the way in which we again observe through these specimens we learn so it is both we are both we are all such complex you know humanity so complex what I think is very interesting about this show too is that it really shows that design is in everything yes and when we went to see the specimens at at natural history we went to their storage space which actually this image there is a photograph of Roxy born who was the most famous ornithologist that worked for the Smithsonian that's her photograph in the middle of the store it's a very malleable thing it's almost like having a piece of paper that you're trying to sort of fold into a very specific kind of shape it can be folded into a million different types of shapes and some ornithologists were actually quite famous for just the preparation of the birds which way of being who created this color system for all ornithologists essentially he was very taken by the fact that ornithologists used so many different kinds of descriptives to talk about bird feathers he just thought that that wasn't scientific at all how can we all talk about a bird in so many different kinds of ways how do we know it's that bird and this was sort of his way of systematizing it and then the way that he would prepare the bird was also sort of very exact and these are bird specimens that Rigbert himself had collected and also prepared and you can sort of see that that wanting to be bird was very tiny Rigbert well kept in comparison with some of the other bird specimens that we saw which were a lot messier or sometimes the bird no longer looks like itself we saw that a lot with owls where we said are you sure that's an owl asking the ornithologists and he would talk to us about you know how do you design a specimen and it was so helpful for us in thinking about the exhibition and how we created these comparisons between something like wallpaper or an industrially produced textile with the specimens the museum was actually reticent at first to lend us the specimens because they didn't want us to use them as curiosities so we really had to make a case for it even though we're all part of Smithsonian they said hold on you know back it up with some writing what is it the rationale for bringing these scientific specimens the story was very compelling obviously but that wasn't enough and so we really had to show how we were connecting the specimens with the design process with the finished product and actually I think that this is a really beautiful area where you see something like the bird wing specimen here with the studies of bird wings that are done with such precision it has an artistic quality to it but it's also very much looking at the quality of the bird wing and this was a study for wallpaper and textiles and this is a moment where artists and designers are really looking at the natural world looking at scientific books and interpreting that in their own way to create things like this wild wallpaper design which perfectly shows the cockatoo in its formal sort of descriptive way but the color is that this artist has used it's total fantasy but you still feel like you're looking at a real bird and I think that we in international was about also speaking about the rigorous methodologies that designers use as well as the scientific process uses as scientists so I think that if you think when that happens it's like it should satisfy the ornithology it should satisfy the birders, everyone as well as designers so the organization of the feathers need to be in the right direction to really behave for example I just saw a bird and I wish I would remember what it was oh what's the name it's the swallow, the night swallow it's known as a night swallow the reason why that is so strange and rare is because the organization of the feathers does not match this they are more fanned and open and it's almost in between a toad and a bird and it really is the patterning so if we would not follow the correct methodologies then of course we're speaking of a completely different species so that was fascinating for example the way that some of these are then an interpretation of a material that ends up looking like feathers but they are basically hammered nails and that just somehow in the way that they are made that they resemble the feathers using the technologies here to be able to do a 3D printing of this right that one is just unbelievably beautiful isn't it let's see it must be right I remember yeah feathered and then I'll also add in the corner we have another small interactive which you can I think someone might have played it earlier but we also wanted to show that these birds are still very much alive you know they exist in our environment and here we have photographs of all the birds alive in their environment and you can learn more about the birds and also see where they live throughout the world and then you can also hear their bird call and remember that I wanted this is what I wanted for the opening of the show I would want kids all throughout here just each one making a different bird call because they are good at that and that I think would be so fascinating it's just the way of being able to bring them to life and so this piece was such a wonderful thing that you were able to do to have that Rebecca as you probably come to see is someone who embraces tensions you know that's very much a part of her work and you see the bird specimen here and it's meant to make you feel uncomfortable but it's also meant to inspire you in some way and so that I think is what I really loved about working on the show is thinking about these tensions not necessarily saying like well we have to make it this way because we want people to feel like this but say no we want people to feel sad we want them to feel happy, curiosity anger you know feel all of those things at the same time and embrace that and think about it in their own work as well hopefully Clara Clara because as I mentioned we are so many contradictions you know we live constantly in paradoxes so I feel that that made so much sense at our show you know would be would have that tension as well yeah