Beatriz Cortez
Beatriz Cortez is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist, sculptor, and Professor of Art at the University of California, Davis. Her work explores migration, memory, multiple temporalities, speculative futures, Indigenous knowledge, and ancestral technologies, and she was included in the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Adobe and Robotics Recast Ancient Craft as Future Infrastructure
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, artists Beatriz Cortez and Ronald Rael argue that ancient technologies should be treated not as primitive artifacts but as active systems of intelligence. Through Cortez’s work with migration, steel, plants, and Indigenous temporalities, and Rael’s experiments with adobe, robotics, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, they make the case that innovation depends less on leaving ancestral knowledge behind than on bringing it into contact with contemporary tools.
Ancient Material Knowledge Is a Blueprint for Future Technology
Artists Beatriz Cortez and Ronald Rael argue that ancient material knowledge should be treated not as artifact but as technology still capable of shaping the future. In a discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival, they make the case through steel, adobe, volcanic ash, border wall fragments, seeds, caves, and robots: older forms of intelligence can work with contemporary tools rather than be displaced by them. Their shared target is the assumption that innovation means leaving ancestral knowledge behind.