Projects in Cañada de GómezProjects in Cañada de Gómez
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Cover image for THE LAST ARMOR What if protection
THE LAST ARMOR What if protection wasn't about keeping something out — but keeping something alive? For centuries, armor has meant protection. Steel between the body and the world. A barrier against impact, violence, and another human being. When I encountered Ferdinand I's armor at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I didn't want to redesign it. I wanted to question what protection itself could become. So I kept the armor. Its silhouette. Its history. Its scars. Even the Virgin and Child engraved into its breastplate. And I changed what happens inside it. Steel becomes glass. Not perfect glass. Not beautiful, untouchable glass. Heavy glass. Cold glass. Imperfect glass. A material that no longer keeps the world out, but allows something fragile to exist within. At first, there is almost nothing. Then something begins. A trace. A filament. Life. The armor is no longer preparing a body for what is outside. It is protecting what is still becoming. Then the steel returns. But the purpose doesn't. Glass remains hidden in the joints. Life finds its way through the seams. The object survives. Its history survives. Its memory survives. But its meaning has changed. THE ARMOR SURVIVED. THE REASON FOR WEARING IT CHANGED. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/23944
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Cover image for Our screens are filling up. Notifications. Avatars. Digital ...
Our screens are filling up. Notifications. Avatars. Digital layers. More and more things placed on top of the world we already live in. But what if spatial computing didn’t add more to reality? What if it could edit reality itself? I created AURA — THE SECOND SHADOW, a speculative campaign for OpenAI imagining a visual direction for the next generation of spatial computing hardware. Tokyo turns noise into silence. New York breaks the rules of weight. Paris bends time. Lagos finds order inside chaos. Dubai makes presence disappear. Five cities. One new physical law. The full visual system is now live on Contra ↓ https://contra.com/p/OemeorXL-aura-the-second-shadow-campaign?referralExperimentNid=DEFAULT_REFERRAL_PROGRAM&referrerUsername=consultora_laboral_szrx5s57 What would your second shadow edit?
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Cover image for A speculative editorial campaign exploring
A speculative editorial campaign exploring conservation as the next definition of luxury. For over a century, fashion photographed arrival. We rarely photographed what comes after. Rooted in luxury's quietest paradox: inside every luxury object exists something designed to prevent its disappearance — a 5g silica sachet, a wrapping, an invisible gesture. The least desirable object in the package, responsible for preserving the most desirable one. Luxury is no longer acquisition. It is the invisible labor that stops acquisition from disappearing. The word RUNWAY was never typed. It was built entirely through physics — gravity, shadow, material behavior and real chemical reaction — across four connected conservation scenes (R / UN / WA / Y), engineered as a single modular visual system rather than four separate generations. Because everything we preserve has a limit. The leather. The photograph. The memory. The skin. Us. Perhaps the next luxury is not owning something that lasts forever. Perhaps it is learning to stay with something while it doesn't last. Speculative Editorial Campaign — RUNWAY 2026
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Cover image for RUNWAY 2026 — PRESERVATION ANXIETY The things we keep. For o...
RUNWAY 2026 — PRESERVATION ANXIETY The things we keep. For over a century, fashion photographed arrival: the new dress, the intact leather, the perfect object. We almost never photographed what comes after: cleaning, repairing, wrapping, storing, preserving. RUNWAY 2026 starts from a paradox: inside every luxury object there is something designed to prevent its disappearance. A small silica sachet. A wrapping. An invisible gesture. Luxury is no longer acquisition. It is the work that stops acquisition from disappearing. The campaign turns that idea into a physically built visual system. The word RUNWAY was never typed. It was created through gravity, shadow, material behavior and a real chemical reaction, across four connected scenes: R — ABSORPTION UN — PROTECTION WA — CONSERVATION Y — SATURATION These are not four independent images. They are a single system. Because everything we preserve has a limit: the leather, the photograph, the memory, the skin, us. Perhaps the next luxury is not owning something that lasts forever. Perhaps it is deciding what deserves to be conserved. Speculative Editorial Campaign — 2026. This project summarizes the full process I offer as a service: cultural research, concept, visual system and AI-directed production — from idea to a coherent, publication-ready visual identity. Creative Direction, Art Direction, Concept, Visual System Design and Directed Production: Vanesa Martinez.
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Cover image for RESTORE AVAILABLE: Let Some Things
RESTORE AVAILABLE: Let Some Things Stay Lost All recent technology was built on a promise: nothing has to be lost. Backup, history, restore. Now AI does not just save, it reconstructs. But humans never worked like that: we are not archivists, we are editors. We forget, we cut, we leave things behind. RESTORE AVAILABLE explores a question that never needed to be asked before: what happens when someone can perfectly recover something, and chooses not to? Five covers of a fictional magazine, connected by the same physical album and a constant rule: in each image, a reflection shows what could be restored, never reality. In the last piece, that rule transforms: the reflection stops showing a possible alternative and instead shows what was decided to be kept. The ability to recover something does not create the obligation to recover it. 01: THE VERSION OF ME A youthful photograph, with one person removed. The fragment remains intact, kept to the side. Only in the reflection of the glass does the complete version exist. The first question of the series: who decides to stop being someone they already were? 02: THE RUPTURE A couple on the beach; only one of the two remains in the image. A nearby phone holds the complete photograph, available but switched off. Restoration is possible. The decision is not. 03: THE FRIEND Four friends at a table; one has been removed from the scene. A piece of paper with a phone number suggests the person is still alive, reachable. This absence is not about death, it is about the distance someone chose to sustain. 04: THE LIFE WE DIDN'T TAKE A desk from a profession that was never practiced. A frame, still wrapped, never got hung. The reflection shows the full wall; reality remains empty. Not everything we could have been needs to come back. 05: THE CHOICE The album, open to a blank page. Around it, the objects that have appeared throughout the series, gathered together for the first time. The reflection no longer offers an alternative: it arranges what was decided to be kept. Leave it there.
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Cover image for FINALLY I COULD There are things
FINALLY I COULD There are things we've wanted to do for years. Say something we never found how to say. Cook a recipe we inherited, even though no one ever fully explained how. Give shape to a memory we carry inside, even if we don't know how to draw it. Talk to someone far away and finally find the words. Understand something we've been doing for years without really understanding why. They weren't big dreams. They weren't impossible. There was just something in the way. Lack of time. Lack of knowledge. Lack of skill. Lack of words. Lack of access. And many times we learned to live with that. To say someday. To leave it for later. To think that some things just weren't for us. Until a tool appeared capable of removing some of that friction. Not to do everything for us. Not to feel for us. Not to replace desire, memory, curiosity or effort. Just to clear the path. Because AI didn't invent happiness. Happiness was already there. In a letter someone needed to write. In a recipe someone wanted to bring back. In a memory someone wanted to see again. In a conversation someone wanted to have. In a question someone had been wanting to answer for years. AI just made getting there a little easier. And maybe that's one of the most human shifts of this new era: not having to wait so long to do the small things we always wanted to do. That's why this campaign doesn't celebrate what AI can do. It celebrates what we can do now that some things are no longer in the way. Because in the end, the machine can help. It can explain. It can translate. It can organize. It can draw. It can find a way. But the letter is still yours. The memory is still yours. The recipe is still yours. The conversation is still yours. The question is still yours. And the hand that picks up the pen is too. AI didn't give you happiness. It just took the waiting line away. FINALLY I COULD.
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Cover image for FINALLY I COULD 2. An editorial campaign about happiness in ...
FINALLY I COULD 2. An editorial campaign about happiness in the age of AI. We usually talk about AI in terms of what it can do. I wanted to talk about what we can finally do because of it. A letter we couldn't write. A recipe we couldn't understand. A memory we couldn't draw. A conversation we couldn't have. Something we've been doing wrong for years because we never understood why. Nothing extraordinary. Just small things that had been waiting inside ordinary people for a very long time. AI didn't create the desire. It didn't create the memory. It didn't create the happiness. It simply removed some of the friction between wanting something and being able to do it. That is the difference between easy happiness and cheap happiness. Cheap happiness is when the machine does the meaningful part for you. Easy happiness is when the machine removes the obstacle that was keeping you from doing it yourself. That distinction became the visual language of the campaign. Five covers of the same fictional contemporary culture magazine, HAPPINESS. Five different lives. Five different obstacles. Five tiny moments of possibility. The same worn notebook. The same blue pen. Because no matter how intelligent the tool becomes, what remains at the end is still what a person did with it. The campaign is called: FINALLY I COULD. POR FIN PUDE. Not because AI made us extraordinary. But because sometimes happiness was never that far away. We just couldn't get to it yet. Vanesa Martinez 
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Cover image for FINALLY I COULD 1. An editorial
FINALLY I COULD 1. An editorial campaign about happiness in the age of AI. We usually talk about AI in terms of what it can do. I wanted to talk about what we can finally do because of it. A letter we couldn't write. A recipe we couldn't understand. A memory we couldn't draw. A conversation we couldn't have. Something we've been doing wrong for years because we never understood why. Nothing extraordinary. Just small things that had been waiting inside ordinary people for a very long time. AI didn't create the desire. It didn't create the memory. It didn't create the happiness. It simply removed some of the friction between wanting something and being able to do it. That is the difference between easy happiness and cheap happiness. Cheap happiness is when the machine does the meaningful part for you. Easy happiness is when the machine removes the obstacle that was keeping you from doing it yourself. That distinction became the visual language of the campaign. Five covers of the same fictional contemporary culture magazine, HAPPINESS. Five different lives. Five different obstacles. Five tiny moments of possibility. The same worn notebook. The same blue pen. Because no matter how intelligent the tool becomes, what remains at the end is still what a person did with it. The campaign is called: FINALLY I COULD. POR FIN PUDE. Not because AI made us extraordinary. But because sometimes happiness was never that far away. We just couldn't get to it yet. Vanesa Martinez 
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