TEDGlobal 2013 guest curators Nassim Assefi and Gabriella Gomez-Mont share how they created the session, “The World on Its Head,” which will make you rethink the global order.

Session 6 of TEDGlobal 2013 has a captivating title: “The World on its Head.” Guest curated by Nassim Assefi and Gabriella Gómez-Mont — both from the inaugural class of TEDGlobal 2009 Fellows — the session will be a chance to turn our conceptions of the Middle East and Latin America upside down, and to rethink staid assumptions about politics, religion, art, architecture, peacemaking and more. 

Here, the TED Blog asks Assefi and Gómez-Mont to share what inspired the session and how they went about picking speakers.

Where did the theme “The World on Its Head” come from?

Nassim Assefi: Gabriella and I brainstormed, trying to tie together our two regions. What is the zeigeist in each of our regions? The undercurrents? What do they have in common? How have they been underestimated? Misunderstood? What is their hidden potential? We settled on “The World On Its Head” after viewing a wonderful map of the world with the South facing upward. That visual became a metaphor for rethinking deeply held assumptions and views of the world and sitting with the discomfort of a new idea until the brain adjusts.

Gabriella Gómez-Mont: For me, the idea of “The World on Its Head” rings strongly and intimately with moments in life when I had to truly rethink important things so deeply that the former map no longer works, no longer matches the new reality. That moment, pause, gap, chaos of no longer understanding anything because one fundamental part of understanding crumbles — it’s one of the most enigmatic and profoundly human moments one can go through.

It is both so strangely beautiful and tremendously brutal to rethink once unshakable truths. No wonder all of us, collectively and individually, try to make the world sit still and force maps to remain the same for centuries even when they no longer work. But in the end, that moment of confusion is a fundamental part of every transformation, adventure, and reconstitution — a pure turbulent threshold between paradigms. And then many new possibilities surface after finding one’s footing again in an upside-down world.

How did the guest curation come about?

Assefi: I had been pitching speaker ideas to [TEDGlobal curator] Bruno Giussani since the moment I met him, and many of those suggestions have made it to the TED stage. I play that role at TEDMED, too. In August 2012, we received a marvelous email invitation out of the blue from Bruno to guest curate/host a session at TEDGlobal. There are more than 300 TED Fellows from around the world, each doing amazing work, and no TED Fellow had ever guest curated a session at TED, so this is an incredible honor.

Gabriella and I were chosen in part because we work in, and come from, distinct regions of the world — I represent the Middle East/Central Asia, and Gabriella Latin America. I’m an internist and global women’s health specialist (most recently tackling maternal mortality in Afghanistan). I also write novels, work on civic peace-oriented projects in the Middle East, defend human rights from a medical angle, and am a feminist activist, a single mom, and a diehard TEDhead. Gabriella is an artist, a documentary filmmaker, a curator for the arts in Latin America, and now head of a civic think tank/laboratory for Mexico City.

I represent the sciences/health, literature, and global politics; she is the arts expert, the design/architecture person, a cultural force. We have different styles of working, but in reality, we overlap quite a bit. I speak Spanish and have worked in Central America. She has traveled in the Middle East. We’re both polyglots, crazy dancers, and global citizens, though we have strong predilections for our regions of origin.

The map that inspired the session, “The World on its Head.”

What’s the thrust of the session?

Assefi: It’s about discarding assumptions about the Middle East, Latin America, and the way you think the world works in exchange for groundbreaking ideas that will hopefully inspire you to rethink politics, religion, art, peacemaking, the role of sports, underestimated economies and architecture, and even toxic environments.

Gómez-Mont: Exactly, that is a great description. I was interested in reformulating and rethinking certain gray areas we take for granted, and I wanted to focus on Latin America, on certain places and subjects that could be explored more thoroughly. We sought to make our speakers complement each other, understand how we could weave certain threads among individual narratives, regions and diverse disciplines. And diversity — of age, country of origin, religion, and so on — was important to us.

Can you describe your speakers?

Assefi: All are global citizens/multicultural. Each of them has taken on courageous work. The lineup include: architect and urbanist Teddy Cruz; explorer, writer and filmmaker Holly Morris; economic policy innovator Juan Pardinas; historian/political scientist Trita Parsi; performance artist Tania Bruguera; accidental theologist Lesley Hazleton; and founder of the Beirut Marathon, May El-Khalil.

We found our musician through two other TEDFellows, Meklit Hadero and Esra’a al Shafei. Dina el Wedidi is one of Meklit’s Nile Music artists and is featured in Esra’a’s MidEastTunes app. Through the Rolex Mentor and Protegee Arts Program, Dina has been paired with the famous Brazilian musician, Gilberto Gil. Dina seemed like a poetic fit for our session — the TED Fellow-link to discovering this brazen, beautiful, young woman singer-songwriter from the Middle East, who found her audience during the Arab Spring and is being influenced and mentored by a legendary Latin American musical force.

But we don’t want to give away our speakers’ topics. It’s more fun if you are surprised by our session. At a TED conference, one generally doesn’t know what each speaker’s idea worth spreading will be until show time!

Which speakers do you think are going to knock our socks off? Why?

Assefi: That’s a cruel question, like asking a mother to choose the favorite between her children! The truth is, if curated well, different speakers will wow different people. It depends on what’s happening in your life, what you’ve been thinking about lately, and how open you are to certain ideas. Of the four I’ve chosen, I can imagine each one of them blowing you away. I predict Gabriella feels the same.

Gómez-Mont: I feel the same. And one never knows until that fateful day when the crowd goes silent and the curtain goes up what will happen in that space between those words on paper and the voice on stage — between the careful planning and the happily reckless, often serendipitous, many times shifting, sometimes accomplice or sometimes trickster — reality.

TED Global, themed “Think Again,” kicks off on June 10 in Edinburgh, Scotland. See the full list of speakers, and get lots more information about attending at the conference website. And stay tuned to the TED Blog where we will be bringing you live coverage of the conference.

So now you’re a bureaucrat. 

I’m a bureaucrat! I still can’t believe it. I’ve been a bureaucrat for a whole week. I would have never thought. I’ve worked in the independent space for mostly my whole working life. And suddenly in a weird, serendipitous, strange zigzagging road, TED led me right into the bureaucratic structure of Mexico City government.

How did it happen? 

About six months ago, I organized a TEDx with two good friends of mine. And we decided to invite Dr. Miguel Angel Mancera, our then mayor-to-be, to speak. He was running for mayor at the time, but everybody knew that he was going to win. We also chose as other speakers people that we thought it would be fascinating for him to hear about – people who have really great ideas for Mexico City. And as well as seeing a huge richness that already is, we also feel that there is enormous potential to make it an even more exciting city.

After that, I got an invitation to propose a project. At first, I thought they would be willing to fund some things on the outside, but it turns out that he invited me to jump on his team.

What did you propose?

It was a project that is called Laboratory for the City. This would be Mexico City’s new creative think tank. This is not a space that exists in any other government in the world.

One of the things we will be doing is to incubate good ideas and create pilot programs. We’ve been very much inspired by, for example, a project in Boston called New Urban Mechanics that’s directed by Nigel Jacobs. They are creating an incubator of good ideas from civil society and inside of government, working as a more experimental space that can mitigate risk. They’ve done amazing stuff, from working with a mother whose kid has autism to create all sorts of tools that she’d been working on informally that will now be implemented in public schools, to, for example, these apps where you can report if there’s a pothole.

If and when ideas prove successful in the experimental space, then we can actually work with other departments to inject these ideas into a more formal structure.

I’m also super excited that this is going to become a space to think about the city in a multidisciplinary manner. It’s very much akin to what I had been doing with Tóxico Cultura, and it also very much incorporates what I’ve learned from three years as a TED Senior Fellow.

I met my mayor because of a TEDx, but the reason why I got offered this job is because, through TED, I’ve been put through a three-year school dealing with things that not only have to do with art and culture, but a lot to do with technology and innovation – basically pushing forth a series of conversations that are not only related to arts and culture.

So what’s your vision?

We’d like for this to become a vortex to think about the city as a concept, and a place to invite people in from all over the world, across disciplines, to try out new ideas. In a conversation with a friend recently, we discussed how it hasn’t been since modernism that the concept of what a city is has been so much up for grabs. What is a digital city? What is a smart city? Is densification a good thing?

Mexico City, which has been a megalopolis since Aztec times, was the poster child of everything a city should try to avoid. We have all the problems of an emerging-world city: social divide, pollution, problems with water, you name it. But now, Mexico City has a great potential to be the epitome of a city that can prototype ideas. It has an absolutely enviable infrastructure, and it’s the eighth largest city economy in the world. This is not something that a lot of people know. Because there’s densification, there are many interesting minds that are there to clash and meet and breed ideas, as Matt Ridley would say. And we just got a prize for sustainable transport, competing against smaller cities like Copenhagen.

Basically TED has been fundamental in pushing this forth in a strange serendipitous way, preparing the mindspace for all that is coming. How can we create cities together? What is needed for Mexico City to become one of the world’s sexiest, most interesting cities?

Mexico City is home to nearly 9 million people. The 8th largest city economy in the world, Mexico City is bursting with energy, vibrancy and color. But at the same time, it is also facing a health crisis. Diabetes has crept up to become the leading cause of preventable death in Mexico — with about 90 percent of cases stemming from obesity. Experts warn that if the prevalence of this disease continues to rise, it could overwhelm Mexico’s health system.

TED Senior Fellow Gabriella Gómez-Mont has a fascinating idea: could dancing be part of the solution?

Mexico City is known for dance — from couples well-versed in salsa and cumbia to the city’s dance halls where young people sweat under laser lights. Gómez-Mont wondered if this spirit could be harnessed to promote health. She asks, “What if we could turn a whole megalopolis into one gargantuan dance floor, and promote an active lifestyle while having fun and taping into the playful, social and happily competitive side of the city?”

In collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of experts — including Pablo Landa, Clora Romo, Constanza Gómez-Mont & Taxidermie  — Gómez-Mont is launching a citywide dance competition. The vision? For the whole city to become a dance floor.

Gómez-Mont’s idea is to bridge virtual and physical space. While neighborhoods and communities will be encouraged to host in-person dancing events, their events can be submitted for awards with the help of a new website, as well as through Gómez-Mont’s independent culture lab Tóxico and Laboratorio para la Ciudad, a creative urban think-tank that she co-founded. People will vote on winners over social media, where they can also connect with other communities up on their feet and shaking it.

“I am intrigued by the idea that cities should not only house the human body, but also provoke the human imagination,” says Gómez-Mont. “This for me is the essence of City 2.0.”

In 2012, the TED Prize was bestowed upon an idea rather than an individual — The City 2.0, an online platform for the sharing of ideas to make cities function better. The $100,000 prize was broken into 10 grants of $10,000 each, to be given to a variety of projects spanning areas like transportation, education, housing, health and public space. Gabriella Gómez-Mont has been given the final grant.

To read all about the winners, head to the City 2.0 website.

Photo: Stefan Ruiz

You’ve said that being a TED Fellow messed with your mind. Why?

Tóxico Cultura — the independent art lab and cultural salon I founded in 2007 — is very much about exploring the unmapped gray areas between artistic disciplines, creating experimental territories and temporal states of exception, since creativity and imagination have a way of becoming unbound in those types of spaces.

But since the TED Fellowship I have come to realize that I was defining “multidisciplinary” within the scope of arts and culture itself — art, design, film, literature, music, and so on. Now, because of TED, it’s become a bit more wild and untamed. Among the Fellows there are writing doctors and filmmaking scientists and space economists and space archeologists and do-it-yourself neurologists, and the list goes on and on — so many inspiring and madly creative people reinventing the edges of their own worlds.

So I’ve become fascinated by what it means to amplify and to make even more complex a multidisciplinary bridge-building platform, and what it could mean to take it further and to help generate a creative ethos in Mexico City that traverses many different territories.

So it’s blown open what art means to you.

Yes. Art at the edge of other things. And it’s blown open what it means to create multidisciplinary projects, and what it means to work in a multidisciplinary manner, what we could learn from each other if we learn to import thought structures from elsewhere, and learn to “speak” in different languages, if you will. As Wittgenstein once put it: the limits of our language are the limits of our world. And the question is how to sometimes untie those languages, limits and boundaries. There is a certain comfort in defining ourselves tightly and safely, but it also stops us from exploring what lies outside of the things we already know and who we already are.

My time with the TED Fellows has also made me become avidly curious about people and projects in Mexico focused on other areas of knowledge. I have started doing in-depth interviews and mapping different fields, and suddenly I’m seeing that there’s so much creative thought outside of arts and culture, and so many links to be made between different disciplines and people, both locally and internationally. So many things could be possible with a nudge here and there.

So that is what Tóxico will focus on: helping certain conversations catch fire by putting the right people in touch and creating meeting points, or building knowledge structures through talks, seminars or workshops around different subjects — human rights and censorship in journalism, to name one upcoming example, an urgent conversation in Mexico nowadays — all on intimate territory because I am a huge believer in the power of small encounters that lead to larger repercussions through chain reactions. I am reworking the way Tóxico functions as a catalyst, an intoxicating agent…

This all happened because of the TED Fellowship?

Oh, definitely. Before the TED Fellowship I was really happy with our projects. It’s already a large world in itself, right, working between the different disciplines that make up the arts, plus also doing my own personal projects, consulting and designing multidisciplinary art programs, guest editing international magazines, curating, writing and now directing film. But it has been so intensely inspiring to see what other Fellows are doing that I have become utterly captivated with what it means to help create an innovative and creative society across disciplines.

It has also made me ponder on the place of culture in the whole scheme of things. I still believe in art for art’s sake, of course, but I also find it really interesting to think both about how art can be provoked by other areas, as well as how other disciplines can benefit from incorporating artistic thought processes into their inner workings. What I find most alluring about the art world — the reason why I got into art in the first place, in fact — is that it manages to create territories composed of a mix between so-called fiction and so-called reality: inject life with imagination and create symbolic narratives that then have the possibility of creating worlds unto themselves. Art can become a blueprint for reality in that way, and a hypothetical playground for minds let loose.

I love your tagline that imagination is not a luxury.

I think many of us who are drawn to the arts are seduced by the notion of how reality gets constructed through imagination, narrative and symbolic structures — all these mysterious intangible things on the other side of reason. It’s humbling to think that most everything we see outside ourselves started at one point in a tiny corner of somebody’s mind: just a tiny electric jolt between one synapse and the next and then: voilá. This.

Take Fellini, for example. He often said that he felt most alive when constructing his big strange sets and picking the people that lived in those sets and imagining scenarios and this or that type of sensation: building an outlandish reality and spinning stories for all to live out together. In fact, he was often quoted saying that this life solely created by his imagination was the only reality that interested him. That might be taking things a bit too far, but I do find it fascinating that in so many ways one invents and sets up the rules of engagement in artistic projects: “I will now write as someone I have never been, or I will make a film that will be one magnificent excuse to get to know another side of life and ask all sorts of questions that would have been too intimate or impertinent in another context, or design an impossible city that maybe one day someone else will make real.” So many doors open up. It’s an exercise in creating adjacent possibilities; it’s a gym for the muscles of the mind and the imagination. And everything from the way we think of ourselves to the way communities engage are very much built upon certain social stories — the drawing of borders, the make-up of religion, politics, identity — we first invented and then collectively decided to be true. Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s tragic. Culture, in its widest definition, is the great a priori.

Someone once said that stories are tools for living. I agree. Narrative is such an important thing. Sometimes even a single word can do the trick: “Give me the right word and I will move the world”, Joseph Conrad wrote. So right now, I’m profoundly interested in deepening my understanding of how narrative plays out and creates a social imagination that then births that thing we call reality, and how to apply fiction to the everyday. Mexico is going through very tough sociopolitical times just now, but, simultaneously, so many interesting things are happening in so many fields, there is so much potential, so much hunger for things different. But what are the prevailing narratives we are focusing on, what could the counter-narratives be, and how do they get constructed and where? How to inspire individuals and back projects so that we engage with the more interesting and imaginative possible scenarios?

So how does Tóxico work?

Tóxico has a fluctuating, liquid structure. It becomes whatever I need it to be month by month. Even the structure itself is thought of as an artistic project, and its main drive is to further creative excellence in Mexico City, and spread the idea that imagination is not a luxury. I change spaces for each project, hosting events in super-sophisticated auditoriums, in a 17-story abandoned hotel in the city center, in state-of-the-art film studios, in a stunning colonial house, in universities, open plazas, in museums.

Besides the workshops and lectures, we have a local mentorship program and an international internship system for young artists, and also create our own content such as collective art, editorial and film projects, curate exhibitions, and so on. And Tóxico extra-officially also functions as an agency: we have connected hundreds of people both locally and internationally. We just got a nice national grant to create a digital platform concentrating and showcasing Mexican creativity to a worldwide audience, helping to build that narrative I mentioned, and helping us visualize and realize how electric our cultural scene is nowadays.

I think one of the biggest strengths of Tóxico — and the reason why a relatively small independent project has been able to have an exponential impact — has come from understanding the power of catalytic points: of finding those precise places that when touched or provoked slightly create a magnified effect, in the same way a tiny tap of the doctor’s triangular hammer on that strategic place of the knee makes the leg jump into the air.

We are continuously trying to identify new creative needs, and then invent ways to help fill the gaps. The workshops and lectures, for example, started as a way of creating concentrated mind-spaces, complementary or even in contrast to more institutionalized academic programs, as well as to create intimate international dialogues. The Días de documental festival and lecture series was born because in 2004 documentary film was greatly under-appreciated in Mexico. Our new mentorship program evolved when I saw that certain needs of young talented artists were not being met. In 2008 I created a multidisciplinary pilot program for the 12 best students of a private university, teaching them the possibility of socially aware creativity; the program was a huge success and continues to this day. Agnès Godard, one of the few women cinematographers to make it into the big leagues, was invited to give a week-long course when we found out about an exciting and growing community of Mexican women photographing in film.

Our relevance is in being a catalyst and a bridge and having a very flexible structure so we can quickly start necessary conversations with the right people at the right time, and move on when those specific conversations have caught a fire of their own. Our relevance then, paradoxically, is our desire to become irrelevant, one issue at a time.

You must have a lot of people around you in support.

That is the most beautiful thing of all. For some mysterious reason Tóxico has become a “strange attracter” for amazing people. I really do feel so fortunate because we’ve got these young, super-talented, energetic, hungry people that want to do things, that are just trying to figure out the world anew. And then on the other hand, I also have a really solid relationship with institutions, embassies, very established artists, designers, filmmakers, museum directors, international projects and so on. It’s exciting to be able to access the best of all worlds, remain independent and bypass bureaucracy.

Also, among the TED Fellows I have found new, grand accomplices and muses. Benji Zusman — scientist and filmmaker — was my most valuable advisor this past year while I was directing my first feature length documentary. Lope Gutierrez-Ruiz and I are in continuous contact to create a Latin American cultural network. Erik Hersman and the rest of the Ushahidis have been a huge inspiration in thinking about the possibilities of re-envisioning national narratives, helping build an innovative society in so-called developing countries, plus breaking international stereotypes. A long conversation I had with Perry Chen, co-founder of Kickstarter, while he was in Mexico made me revise some fundamental ideas and had very palpable repercussions. And the list goes on. TED has been amazing. I feel very fortunate to be part of this nomadic, polymath and slightly crazy community.

You were an inaugural TED Senior Fellow, and TEDGlobal 2012 will be your last TED as a Fellow. How are you feeling about this?

Very, very nostalgic. So what I’m doing now is setting up bridges for the future. Besides the ongoing Tóxico workshops and conferences series, I’ll soon be starting seminar-type programs, as well as a residency in Mexico City which will hopefully become a gathering place for Fellows; already we are planning the visit of several TED Fellows for the next year to start several conversations across borders and disciplines. During my six months at Yale as a World Fellow — which coincides beautifully with my last TED conference — I will be gathering ideas and putting everything into motion for my return. Mexico City is one of the most fascinating, complex and layered cities on Earth and I love the idea that it could become, through Tóxico, a meeting ground for bold, playful, imaginative thinkers: TED Fellows, Yale Fellows, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists and more, sinking their hands into the city, spreading their ideas throughout it, and conversing over tacos and tequilas galore.