Regenerative Visual Language from my Ancestral Seed

Keynote

November 10, 2021

09:05

Regenerative Visual Language from my Ancestral Seed

Frida Larios

The artifacts of a culture are transient. Codices burn. Buildings decay. Language can be lost. But a narrative once told lives forever. I come from El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America with the deepest cultural identity and social crisis derived from centuries of colonial oppression and genocides, a total expropriation of all original land and decimation of our language. In 2004, these overwhelming historical tensions inspired me to co-create a cultural movement titled Animales Interiores, and while creating it, to find my own Indigineity. The Animales Interiores unique system re-codifies a small part of the Maya mythic narrative giving ancestral oral tradition new graphic form. The methodology speaks from and with today’s Indigenous communities by borrowing directly from the logo-graphic principles of ancestral precolonial scribes. For 15 years I have facilitated and dialogued these blood memory lines with elderly, children, youth, and designers. Animales Interiores is a regenerative workshop led by Frida Larios and community guardians, bridging and facilitating ancestral Indigenous visual languages, spiritual and graphical expression, through intercultural books, letters, symbols, textiles, stones, walls, trees, immersing and emerging from place, love and intergenerational community.

Frida Larios

Service Designer - Organization of Organizations

(They - Them)

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Frida Larios is as an urban Indigenous descendant (Nawa-Maya-Afro), typo-graphic artist. She holds a Bachelors of Arts from University College Falmouth in England, and a Masters of Arts in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London. While in London, the former Central American beach volleyball gold medallist taught at the London College of Fashion and Camberwell College of Arts. She is currently Visual Literacy Adjunct Professorial Lecturer at American University in Washington, DC. The Animales Interiores and New Maya (Visual) Language series', based on the logographic principles of ancestral Maya and Nawa hieroglyphs, installations and ofrendas have been exhibited by commission and collection of the Smithsonian Latino Center, widely exhibited in Washington, DC, as well as in Central and South America, Europe and Asia. Larios was commissioned by the El Salvador Olympic Committee to design the delegation uniforms for the Panam Games in Lima, 2019: guided by Iniciativa Portadores del Náhuat elders and a trans-disciplinary team, which included a linguist and archaeologist. Before, Larios had co-designed the El Salvador delegation (TeamESA) uniforms for the Toronto 2015, PanAm Games inauguration ceremony. The Toronto 2015, PanAm Games uniforms were cited among the top 10 by The Star, Canada. The third edition of Larios's intergenerational book: The Community that was Buried by an Erupting Volcano was published in 2019, with guidance of Iniciativa Portadores del Náhuat and Central de Organizaciones Indígenas Campesinas Ch’orti’ Nuevo Día, with a foreword by Payson Sheets, PhD, principal researcher of Joya de Cerén of UC Boulder. Larios’ collaborative works and texts have been featured in The Guardian US, Telemundo 44 Washington DC, Smithsonian Magazine (Online), BBC2, BBC Radio 4, Getty Images, Agence France-Presse (AFP, London), Copa Airlines TV, PRINT Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, ElFaro.net, Courrier International, TASCHEN, Thames & Hudson, among others.