known and regarded iconic designer, Faye Toogood; but home beckoned and in 2015 Fernando returned to Mexico. There he participated in an artistic residency in Oaxaca, where he began working with materials native to Mexico.
Engaging Context
Corn husks emerged as a material with which he saw potential. He knew he needed to source the material to truly explore its potential. With such in mind he returned to a village he had visited as a child – Santo Domingo Tonahuixtla – a place of which he had “fond memories [of those times], working, playing, chasing insects
and hunting rabbits in abundant fields of heirloom corn that were cultivated by a thriving community of Indigenous Mixtec farmers. Their crops grew tall — in shades of creamy yellow, brick red and pinkish brown — until they were
harvested and sent to market.”2
As he tells it, the Tonahuixtla he returned to did not match the place fondly remembered from his childhood. It was no longer a thriving agriculturally based village, populated by a tightly knit community. Instead, he found a ravaged landscape, which appeared as if it was “growing rocks.”4 He also found a community fractured by globalization, immigration, and the false promise of prosperity gained in the U.S.
The striking change in this once thriving village was the result of the global trade pact called the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) – one that opened the floodgates of trade and agribusiness between the US, Mexico, and Canada. Under NAFTA, farmers were
Part of the project is raising awareness about how fast we're losing all of this diversity that took thousands of years to make selective breeding, and now it's disappearing within a few decades.3
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Opposite Page:
Fernando as a young man visiting his friend Delfino in Tonohuixtla (Fernando wearing the blue cap and sister Sofie in the pink cap).
Left:
Corn
Photographs Courtesy of:
Fernando Laposse