CubaCreativa (2014–present) investigates how material and technological scarcity—in Cuba and similar contexts—generates alternative paths of knowledge and innovation. With a transdisciplinary approach that combines mapping informal practices, aesthetic intervention, and building collaborative networks, the project moves beyond straightforward anthropological documentation to reveal complex systems of insurgent creativity. By analysing collective strategies such as recycling obsolete technology or reinventing everyday objects, it not only showcases practical solutions to scarcity but also questions hegemonic paradigms of innovation: it demonstrates that lack of resources, far from a limit, catalyses its own technical and aesthetic imaginaries and challenges the centre-periphery hierarchy.

Going further than the local, CubaCreativa travels in search of global resonances: it maps territories where social creativity emerges as a response to necessity and compiles a living glossary of the terms each culture uses to name these practices. Brazilian gambiarra, Indian jugaad, Anglophone DIY, and the Japanese concepts of chindōgū and urawazaeach reveal a distinctive vision of the relationship between urgency, ingenuity, and technology. By integrating not only images and devices but also the language that legitimises and shares these inventions, the archive recognises words as a fundamental part of the creative act and as bridges between communities that, though geographically distant, share the logic of “making with what’s at hand.”

The projects section shows how this research—committed to democratising technical knowledge—subverts narratives of planned obsolescence and unequal access, positioning popular inventiveness as a form of cultural resistance. CubaCreativa thus invites us to rethink innovation not as a privilege of abundance but as a collective practice that, from the margins, redefines the possible: a manifesto on the enduring power to create, against all odds.