Estudio CKS at Volcano Innovation Summit 2026
There are places you get to know before you ever visit them. You know them through images, through the stories told by those who have been there, or through what you expect to find when you finally arrive.
Antigua Guatemala was different.
Arriving in this city to take part in Volcano Innovation Summit 2026 meant discovering a place where the past doesn’t seem separate from the present. Cobblestone streets, colonial buildings, churches, and ruins coexist with hotels, restaurants, workspaces, businesses, and international gatherings.
Antigua Guatemala has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979 and preserves much of its historic urban layout and architecture. But it is also becoming a setting for new conversations about innovation, entrepreneurship, investment, and business in Latin America.
And perhaps that is one of the defining characteristics of Volcano Summit: it takes place in a place with a strong identity, while looking toward what comes next.
Antigua Guatemala: Between History and What Comes Next
Walking through Antigua means constantly encountering this coexistence.
An old doorway may be just a few meters away from a space where an international community of entrepreneurs is gathering. A centuries-old building can share the same street with a hotel welcoming visitors from different parts of the world.
The city preserves traces of a history that began in the 16th century and turned Antigua into an important cultural, economic, religious, political, and educational center of the region for more than two centuries.
Today, that historical context coexists with a city that hosts international gatherings and is becoming a point of connection for those looking to engage with the Latin American ecosystem.
Volcano Summit focuses precisely on that possibility, positioning Guatemala as a bridge between North, Central, and South America, and presenting Antigua Guatemala as a place where dialogue, connection, collaboration, and opportunities converge.
Its goal is to connect founders, investors, innovators, and leaders around the ideas shaping the future of Latin America.
It is not simply the setting for an event.
It is part of the experience.
On the Other Side of the Screen
For Estudio CKS, arriving at Volcano Summit also had a particularly special meaning.
Throughout the website development process, the work had taken place remotely.
Meetings, messages, content, decisions, reviews, and adjustments. A familiar dynamic when working with teams based in other countries.
That’s why finally meeting in Antigua with some of the people we had shared that process with made the project feel even more meaningful and strengthened the connections behind it.
We had the opportunity to meet Janma Bardi, Founder & Co-Chair of Volcano Summit, and Marianne Springmühl, Founder of Volcano Capital, who are part of the founding team behind this ecosystem.
It was also especially meaningful to meet Andrea Chávez, from the Volcano Summit Marketing team, with whom we had shared many of the conversations throughout the website development process.
After so many exchanges through a screen, sharing the same physical space allows you to discover other dimensions of a professional relationship.
How a project is conceived.
The stories behind an organization.
The people who make the decisions.
The conversations that emerge when the context is no longer a video call.
And, above all, who we are really designing for.
An Event That Is Part of Something Bigger
Volcano Innovation Summit is not presented simply as an annual gathering.
It is part of a broader platform focused on accelerating innovation and entrepreneurship across Latin America. Volcano describes the Summit as its flagship event and the epicenter of a network that also includes initiatives related to startups, knowledge, purpose, impact, and capital.
This perspective also changes how we understand digital work.
When an organization builds a community, its website is not simply a place to find information about an event. It is a gateway.
It is where someone can discover the proposition, understand who is involved, explore opportunities, and decide whether they want to be part of it.
But that digital experience exists within a much larger ecosystem.
In this case, that ecosystem has a regional dimension and an explicit mission to connect Latin America with global innovation networks.
What Changes When You’re There
There’s something no video call can replace: the opportunity to experience the context firsthand.
Being in Antigua allowed us to see how a city with such a strong historical identity can become, for a few days, a meeting point for people thinking about business, technology, investment, innovation, and new models of growth for the region.
It also gave us a better understanding of the scale of a project that, until that point, we had primarily known through its digital side.
Because a website can showcase an event. But being there allows you to understand what happens around it. The conversations that take place in the hallways. The encounters that happen spontaneously. The people arriving from different countries. The ideas that continue after a talk. The connections that weren’t part of anyone’s agenda.
In that sense, Volcano Summit offers something that goes beyond conferences: the opportunity to build relationships that can continue long after the event is over.
And Antigua provides a very unique setting for that to happen.
A Perspective from Estudio CKS
For us, this experience was also an opportunity to look at our own work from the outside.
We work in communication, design, and digital experiences for different projects that often have a much greater dimension than what we see on a screen.
A website can be part of an expansion strategy.A visual identity can support the growth of an organization.A platform can connect a community.And a project that begins as digital work can eventually take us to another country to meet in person the people behind it.
That’s what Volcano Summit became for Estudio CKS.
Not simply a project developed from Buenos Aires.Not simply an international event.
It was also an experience that allowed us to discover Antigua Guatemala, meet the people we had worked with for months, and take a closer look at an ecosystem focused on connecting talent, innovation, capital, and opportunities across Latin America.
Perhaps that’s why the experience feels different when we return.
Because now, when we think about the Volcano Summit project, we no longer see just the pages of its website. We see the streets of Antigua. We see the conversations.
We see the people and have a better understanding of the ecosystem behind every screen.
