If you cut a tree you’ll see the circles showing the years that tree has lived imprinted in the wood. If you cut through the noise of a lively afternoon in Ibiza in 2023, you’ll notice that the year we live in is captured in ideas. Love, health, education, compassion, past and future, design and technology – some of those topics are as old as time. But in 2023, yet again, it’s time to go full circle and question things we thought were set in stone. On March 29th TEDxDaltVila invited 18 powerful speakers and performers to pose questions that invite to expand perspectives.
Take energy, for example, humankind has been obsessed with it for as long as we have existed. We cut down forests to light fires and launched wars to take charge of precious oil and gas. In 2023 on the stage of TEDxDaltVila biotech founder Pablo Vidarte asks what would happen if plants in your garden could power up your house? Education is another topic where things are changing faster than you can blink. TEDxDaltVila invited 17-year-old Marina Kestner Pavlock to pose a powerful question: what would happen if teenagers were offered an environment where they could take charge of their own learning: no classes or teachers required?
TEDxDaltVila is a carefully curated fusion of unexpected “what ifs”. What if we used blockchain to trace the origin of the clothes we wear back to the farm where linen for the fabric was grown? What if we didn’t have to choose between monogamy and polyamory? What if we opened our homes and communities to just a few refugees in need?
Mia Kirn, the visionary behind the event, shares that TEDxDaltVila is more of a theatrical show than a conference. A darkened room, dramatic lights, 3..2..1… and a new speaker walks on stage, and the energy in the room changes. There is a sense of sacredness being present while new ideas are born. Who’s bringing them to life? It might be the speaker who put her lifework into some 20-minute talk and recited it a thousand times. It might be the dedicated team who knows that the birth of ideas requires very special conditions: space, time, light and an audience carefully caffeinated to an exact degree. And we shouldn’t forget each of the audience members who chose to take a day out of their life to come and be present for the birth of ideas. Yes, they can watch all of those talks on Youtube later (and so can you). But they are not here JUST for the talks. They are here for the sacred ritual of co-creating.
No wonder that in a room like this ideas turn into action at the speed of light: job offers, new business connections, friendships, and partnerships. For example, one of the speakers left the stage with a sizable donation for her foundation from an audience member. And you are now reading these words because yours truly happened to bump into the editor of Ibiza Style during a coffee break at the event. Cut through the noise on a lively afternoon in Ibiza circa 2023 and you might just see how new ideas and countless encounters born on TEDxDaltVila branch out into new projects that would be changing perspectives on things we once thought were set in stone. And if you are yet to experience the alchemy of a room charged with new visions, stay tuned for the next TEDx in Ibiza which has promised to return in 2024.
