Ever since Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (better known as Bad Bunny) shared his “casita” at this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, a persistent thought has stayed with me. At the time, a lot was said about it from different angles: how much it spoke to Latinidad and pride, how it affected brands, how it reflected today’s geopolitics. For me, what happened was the emergence of an insistent voice in the back of my mind, one that started calling to me and kept being fed over the following months by different stimuli and inspirations. The question was: what is there in your life today that speaks of where you come from? It took me a long time to answer, but I fell in love with the search itself and with how much it has sharpened the way I perceive the world. Sharing it with friends, I realized this genuine search is happening, reinforced even further by fatigue with AI images and by the creative pendulum swinging the other way.

The question took shape through a personal introduction. I needed one slide, or just a few, to define me for an audience that didn’t know me. My instinct was to start with the usual “I’m Juliana and this is my title/job”, as we normally see in any talk. We have grown used to this standard introduction, even in social settings, where we begin with our job titles. The focus automatically falls on the ‘doing’, on the ‘now’ (after all, a job title is hardly forever) and on shared contemporary references. A mix of belonging and social currency, in which people present themselves through something that defines their group, meets social expectations and even brings some status, backed by the fancy corporate titles we have invented. But it was a talk about shared symbolism, and there is no way to talk about that without talking about bias. And to talk about bias, I had to establish what mine was and be consistent with what I was about to present.

So, for the first time, I truly introduced myself through who I am. The first photo was of Juliana as a child, at a Carnival when, according to my mother, I had a fever and she took me anyway. Then came a slide full of Juliana outside the corporate world: laughing out loud, sweaty from a workout, with my dog, as my Duolingo avatar. In short, a glimpse of who I am when nobody is paying me to be anything, yet just as relevant to my work, because it defines me in relation to my references and inspirations, as well as the way I look at the world.

Right after that, I found myself more and more struck by trends in which brands were seeking the aesthetics of human craft: imperfect, clearly handmade and going out of their way to show the opposite of an AI aesthetic. Made for consumers who were starting to reject the artificial, the glitches like the six-fingered canary, the pasteurization of soccer cleats all in the same shade of pink… all stemming from an intelligence built to recognize patterns exquisitely, but that ends up leading everyone who consults it to the same picture of the future.

We began to see this new wave in luxury companies, such as the redesign of the Hermès website and its original illustrations presenting the products, and now we already see it reflected in smaller brands, in bars, restaurants, coffee shops and other categories looking for a closer, more real bond with their audiences. A way of showing personality and references of their own, which little by little are shaping a new semiotics. And the most interesting thing about it all is that in this new symbolism I see a lot of “casita”, or grandma’s house, among the inspirations: in the colors that recall the walls and the clay water filters, in the crochet textures, in the illustrations of the plants that stood by the front door, in the broken-tile floors, in the caramel mutts. A blend of nostalgia and of reclaiming what is ours, mixed with an anthropophagy very much our own, combining contemporary memes with almost timeless symbols of a shared, idealized childhood. Or, a direct look at a collective sense of who we are, beyond titles, careers, the doing, the now.

I carry on searching for the references that make me who I am, while following with curiosity how these inspirations show up in our creative market. At the same time, I am glad to see this search for the human, and attentive to how something so close to the heart is being appropriated and used by brands. Now it remains to be seen whether this becomes a new “pasteurization” and loses its deeper meanings until fatigue sets in, eventually forcing us to look for a new place to find inspiration, or whether we are witnessing the foundation of a new aesthetic that may still bring many new meanings and developments.