Where creativity meets context, art can become strategic.

Ilán Valdés approaches consulting not as a service, but as a way of working — relational, interdisciplinary, and rooted in trust. His consulting practice emerges from years of collaboration across education, activism, design, and the arts, particularly in contexts where storytelling, ethics, and aesthetics need to align.

Rather than offering fixed packages, Ilán brings presence: he listens, co-designs, questions, reframes. His method draws from both lived experience and research-based inquiry — shaped by time in the field, in classrooms, and in community dialogue. He works best in projects that ask for nuance, that value imagination, and that move between the conceptual and the practical.

SELECTED PROJECTS & APPROACHES

Time in Nature — University of the Arts London

While completing his MFA in Fine Art Photography, Ilán was invited to co-design Time in Nature, an experimental curriculum developed with Central Saint Martins. The project aimed to decenter traditional studio teaching and instead ground creative learning in time spent outdoors — fostering ecological literacy, embodied reflection, and alternative knowledge systems.

Ilán brought a pedagogical approach rooted in slowness, care, and systems thinking, bridging his experience as a climate advocate and his interest in epistemologies from the Global South. His contribution helped shape a model that integrated environmental justice, art practice, and curriculum development — now used as a reference in sustainability education within UAL.

CHS Alternativo x DODO x Comunicarte — Peru

In 2024–2025, Ilán collaborated on several public awareness campaigns aimed at violence prevention and youth protection in high-risk areas of Peru.

With CHS Alternativo and DODO Productora Audiovisual, he co-developed a series of 3D-animated video scripts focused on online grooming and extortion, informed by workshops with adolescents from San Juan de Lurigancho. The process combined field-based research (focus groups, interviews) with the creation of visual metaphors and narrative devices that could speak to teens in a non-paternalistic tone. He worked closely with Franco Isa on adapting these ideas into psychedelic 3D visuals.

Simultaneously, through his collaboration with Comunicarte in the Amazon region, Ilán led visual and strategic components for the Click Seguro app launch — a tool designed to help teenagers navigate online spaces more safely. He conducted participatory mapping with local youth, designed community activations, and helped shape the campaign’s visual language to reflect cultural specificity and grassroots accessibility. In a region with low connectivity and radio dependency, his work emphasized analog forms of engagement without losing impact.

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY METHOD

Across all projects, Ilán moves fluidly between roles: facilitator, researcher, writer, designer, listener. He combines theory and intuition, visual culture and ethics, always returning to the same questions:

How can aesthetics serve justice?

How can we tell stories that hold complexity, not erase it?

How do we create with — not just for?

Consulting is never extractive. He works with NGOs, schools, artists, and communities to develop strategies that are context-sensitive and socially grounded — not just “creative” but caring, not just impactful but thoughtful.