The Avocado Legacy — Design Campus Dresden

Week: TERM 1
Date: 20–28 Jul 2023
Theme: MAKING THE DIFFERENCE
Tutors: Fernando Laposse

We all love an avocado, the star of every Sunday brunch, the wholesome fruit full of amino acids, the miraculous vegan alternative to a lot of animal products, the most instagrammable millennial food. But have you ever considered the impacts of global demand for this Mexican fruit?

The workshop will consist in using the waste of avocados to create everything from natural dyes to biomaterials. This will be a material driven workshop where experimentation and craft will be the focus of every exercise.

But besides the practical aspect, participants will also learn about the dark side of “green gold” as it has come to be known in Mexico. We will look at how the avocado trade is one of the biggest driving forces behind deforestation, biodiversity loss, and violence towards vulnerable communities and how this connects to global consumption.

The goal of the workshop is to challenge participants to think systemically and to try and piece together the complex elements of the current environmental crisis.

What is the legacy of avocados? We will discuss this…

Fernando Laposse

Fernando Laposse (Mexico) is a designer with a degree in product design from Central St. Martins.

His practice is material driven and focuses on transforming humble natural fibres such as corn husks, sisal, or loofah into design pieces and new architectural materials.

For Laposse, 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, Laposse 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.

Laposse’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.

www.fernandolaposse.com