The fifth annual Medellin Design Week set out to show that Colombia is ready to stop copying and start developing a national design identity.
Medellin Design Week ? which Dezeen was media partner for ? included a series of talks and workshops organised around the idea of rejecting copying and implementing a strong Colombian design industry.
The theme of the design week, Copias vs Copias, is a play on words, as "copias" translates as "do you copy" in Spanish.
Medellin Design Week asked Colombian designers to reject a culture of copying
The Esto No es Copia (This is Not a Copy) exhibition at the Click Clack Hotel, for example, showcased the best of young Colombian and Latin American talent.
Objects on display came from design brands  Tucurinca, Tu Taller Design and Vrokka, and designers Camila Pardo, Heidi Jalkh, Francisco Jaramillo and Rodolfo Agrella. Colombia's designers have a strategic role to play
Medellin's budding design scene is growing as the city bounces back from the horrors of its recent past.
"Colombia is a country that has been through so many changes in the past few years ? and design is one of them," Colombian industrial designer Rodrigo Torres, who spoke at Medellin Design Week, told Dezeen.
At the end of the 1980s Medellin had been cursed with the title of the world's most violent city, as Pablo Escobar's cartel battled paramilitary forces for control of the illegal drugs trade.
After Escobar's execution in 1993 crime began to...