HYÈRES, FRANCE
On a hillside above the French Riviera, inside a gleaming white Modernist villa that has spent a century hosting some of Europe's most radical artistic experiments, a jury of design professionals just handed its top prize to a set of ceramic vessels that look like they wandered in from two different centuries at once.
Tin Ayala, a designer from Ecuador, won the Grand Prix du Jury in the object-design category at this year's Design Parade, the influential festival held annually at Villa Noailles in Hyères. The winning project, titled "Huacos," reimagines the stirrup-spout vessels of pre-Columbian Andean pottery — ceremonial objects that have survived in archaeological collections for well over a thousand years — by populating them with characters pulled from video games and comic books. The effect is deliberately, almost aggressively anachronistic: ancient ceramic forms, the kind you'd expect to see behind museum glass with a small placard about Moche or Chimú civilization, reworked to carry pop-culture iconography that most viewers under forty would recognize instantly.
The exhibition of Ayala's work and that of nineteen other finalists remains on view at Villa Noailles through August 30, giving visitors a final weekend to see the collection in person before it closes.
Twenty Years of Betting on the Unproven
This year's Design Parade carries extra significance: it marks the festival's 20th anniversary in object design, alongside ten years of its companion competition in interior architecture. Since its founding, the festival has built a reputation as one of the design world's most reliable pipelines for discovering talent before the broader industry catches on — a reputation that made this double-anniversary edition something the organizers clearly wanted to mark with a suitably ambitious winner.
The jury's citation for Ayala's work leaned heavily on its scope, describing "Huacos" as impressing judges through its historical, artistic, and anthropological reach rather than simply its visual novelty. That's a meaningful distinction. Plenty of design work traffics in nostalgia or pastiche for its own sake; what apparently set Ayala's project apart was the seriousness of the research underpinning it. The collection developed out of a research residency at the Larco Museum in Lima, one of the world's foremost repositories of pre-Columbian Peruvian art and artifacts, before Ayala continued the work through the Martell Business Foundation. That grounding in genuine archaeological and museum scholarship is what elevates "Huacos" from a clever mashup into something closer to an argument about how cultures actually persist and transform over time.
What a Stirrup-Spout Vessel Has to Do With a Video Game Character
The huaco form itself carries centuries of specific cultural weight. These stirrup-spout vessels — named for their distinctive looped handle resembling a riding stirrup — were produced by numerous pre-Columbian Andean cultures for ceremonial and everyday use, often decorated with detailed figurative imagery depicting deities, animals, and daily life. They represent one of the most technically accomplished ceramic traditions in the ancient Americas.
By grafting video-game and comic-book characters onto that specific vessel form, Ayala's project makes a pointed suggestion: that the impulse to encode a culture's stories and heroes into everyday objects didn't end with colonization or industrialization, it simply migrated to new media and new characters. A gaming avatar rendered in the same ceremonial clay form as a pre-Columbian deity isn't just a visual joke — it's a proposition about continuity, about how the objects a culture produces to carry its mythology keep changing shape while performing essentially the same function across a thousand years.
As part of his prize, Ayala will take part in a residency at CIRVA, the Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques in Marseille, one of Europe's most respected glass and ceramics research institutions, giving him further institutional resources to develop the "Huacos" concept beyond its festival debut. He has also been invited to exhibit at the MATTER and SHAPE fair in Paris in March 2027, extending the project's visibility well into next year.
Twenty Finalists, One Very French Stage for Global Ideas
Ayala's win didn't happen in isolation. Twenty finalists across the object design and interior architecture categories exhibited work at Villa Noailles this year, turning the villa's famously austere, angular 1920s architecture — designed originally by Robert Mallet-Stevens for the eccentric arts patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles — into a temporary showcase for design ideas from around the world. That contrast, avant-garde European architecture from a century ago hosting contemporary work grappling with globalization, colonial history, and internet culture, is very much the point of the festival, and part of why Design Parade has become a fixture on the international design-world calendar despite Hyères being a relatively small resort town.
What This Means for You
You're unlikely to own a piece from "Huacos" any time soon — prize-winning festival pieces like this typically move into museum collections, gallery representation, or extended studio development rather than immediate retail production. But the ideas underneath Ayala's win tend to move faster than the objects themselves. The mixing of ancient craft techniques with contemporary or pop-culture imagery has become one of the more durable threads running through product and furniture design over the past several years, showing up everywhere from ceramics sold at design fairs to mass-market home goods that borrow the same "old form, new content" logic.
For anyone who follows design as more than just shopping — as a running conversation about how objects carry meaning across generations and geographies — Ayala's win is a useful snapshot of where that conversation currently sits: less interested in inventing entirely new forms from scratch, more interested in excavating old ones and asking what still fits inside them. A thousand-year-old ceramic vessel, it turns out, still has room for whatever we're worshipping now.
