Salone di Mobile Returns with a Roar Thanks to an Uplifting New Class of Designers

Khaled El Mays first splashed onto the international scene in 2016 at the House of Today Design Biennale with his acclaimed Fishawy collection, which is composed of a rattan laundry basket and a chair with a coat rack jutting out of its back like a fishing rod from which coats can dangle. Since then, the Beirut-based designer has been teaching the design world how to trip without acid. And we would happily stub all of our toes on any piece from his Jungle or Flora collections, which are currently snaking their way through an upper room of Nilufar Gallery Depot.

It is the designer’s third solo presentation at Salone di Mobile with Nilufar Gallery, and arguably his strongest. You can't help but get lost in his tropical forest made of 3D printer-ready hallucinogens lovingly tossed with handcrafted precision and top-shelf (and sometimes recycled) materials. Piqued with the sense of humor we’ve come to love and perhaps demand from El Mays, this collection feels satisfyingly evolved, building upon the language he established with Fishaway, but not dallying there. Instead, it spirals off into a 1970s-dipped frenzy, recalling the ingenuity of Mario Bellini's Camaleonda modular seating system for B&B Italia. It is nice to see galleries as serious about quality as Nilufar, actually helping an artist to keep challenging the bars they set for themselves. 

Architect and designer Tolulope Adebayo had always admired Danish architect Arne Jacobson’s winged Egg chair and the way it made use of an everyday, cultural signifier-laden shape to its own formal ends. Her Ijoko Abeti Aja chair (2021), which we encountered in Design Week Lagos' Salone Satellite showcase, operates much in the same way. After a year of thinking about product design, watching video lectures on YouTube, and more falling down rabbit holes of inspiration and research, the idea for Adebayo's first piece of furniture hit her like lighting.

“As a designer, you always have to study, you always have to look at history, you have to look at what’s happening now, the trends of your time, that's how you train yourself to see,” she says. The Ijoko Abeti Aja chair might resemble origami form to some, and that reference is certainly there, but those familiar with Nigerian fashion will instantly recognize its form as an Abeti Aja cap, the fashion trademark of Yoruba men. Made of handwoven material just like its muse, the chair embodies Adebayo’s ambition to punctuate Nigerian and Western canon at once. “I want to see my chairs everywhere in lobbies and offices and homes, that's the dream,” she says. “I also want to work on making a future iteration that is collapsible and folds in on itself like the paper version I made.” We can see it now: marble lobbies and green lawns occupied by flocks of candy-colored chairs, wings outstretched for imminent flight. 

Another discovery at Salone Satellite sprang out of a group presentation simply titled Young Balkan Designers. It was here we came across Serbian architect and Focal Design Studio co-founder TIjana Kostic’s set of smoked glass-topped side tables and their humorously clamped legs. Kostic’s Subversion collection called to mind Donald Judd’s sense of material essentialism and scarcity with a smack of sculptor Rachel Harrison’s tongue-biting, readymade wit. Here, instead of adorning the coffee table as proof of the owner’s intellectual curiosity, books have graduated into functionality, becoming the cartilage between the pinschers of "quick-grip" industrial clamps, which sub in for more traditional supports. Infinitely transformable and scalable, this modular system reminded us of the open-source generosity of industrial designers like Enzo Mari, who instead of gatekeeping, published reproducible feats that others could mimic with materials that were already at hand in the home or the garage. In this way, Kostic playfully skirts today’s obsession with sustainability and its logical end that the best thing a designer could do is nothing at all.

“Contrary to the consumerist mindset, I’m coming from a culture where things, when broken or no longer needed, are reused, repaired, and given a new life,” Kostic says. “The creativity of this approach inspires me very much.” By empowering her end-user, Kostic also shifts the relationship between maker and user from that of client and producer to co-conspirators. And it's in this subtle adjustment that the magic of Kostic’s idea shines through, challenging the alienation between consumption and creation in a way that felt vital to a platform like Salone. 

The tables, vases, and chairs designer Grace Prince makes start their lives as clip art—the literal kind, where you cut the things you like out of books and magazines and layer them on top of one another with glue. The Milan-based, UK-born artist sources her images from pieces she finds on the street to the volumes she snags from antique shops and art fairs. These references are then collaged and perfected on paper before Prince frankensteins them into three dimensions, where they inevitably take on unexpected character traits that the designer can’t plan for. This is the intrigue she builds into the process for herself, but ultimately what makes the work so compelling to the final beholder as well; there is a tension, for instance, in the spindly, loose joints that connect one leg to another. The materials she employs are often fragments, like the original scraps of paper that compose her drawings, that feel fragile by themselves but when placed inside the logic of her designs become puzzlingly purposeful.

”Collage becomes integral to the sensation I’m trying to analyze within the piece I’m building,” Prince says. “So it’s research stemming from an entropic sensation rather than starting from a particular material.” Her presentation at 5 Vie (a storefront-based design pop-up), Entropy & Desire, takes its name from this idea and stopped us in our tracks as the most ingeniously delicate gesture we saw all week. Her Unsettled Balance collection is composed of one vase, one chair, one low-hanging coffee table esoteric, and essentialist beauty Louise Bourgeois totems. 

At Alcova, an independent design satellite hosted in abandoned military barracks, there were discoveries around every corner, but despite the visual competition, it was still impossible to miss one extra verdant terrace stocked with free-standing kitchens whose geometric profiles looked more like Piet Mondrian paintings than the former. This was a sure sign that the award-winning, Vienna and Berlin-based studio, Chmara.Rosinke, was in full force—bringing with them an entire decade's worth of propositions on how we could collectively recast our kitchens as active spaces, acknowledging not only their function, but for the pedantic and sometimes counterintuitive recipes of culture-making. Looking at the contrast between new works, when asked why, after a decade, the kitchen continues to be such a fruitful site for thought, the duo points to the sensuality of the room and its “smells, colors, sounds, temperatures, and textures.”

“When one learns how to enjoy cooking it is a benefit for everyday life, and for relaxing after a tough day or for starting your day early with aromas of freshly baked bread,” co-founder Maciej Chmara explains. “[When it comes to kitchens] we wish to see more cooking, more work, and more social activities. Many kitchens so often are closed cubes that are personally not inspiring. We like to turn the kitchen inside out; we like to make it a colorful, playful, and inspiring space, the hub of your home, and the center of every good party.” Their most recent mediation on the matter, NPO1, a freestanding structure with a built-in stove top and storage, feels reminiscent of a black box theater, one that we could easily see ourselves mounting a radical performance or meal within. 

Another unmissable scene at Alcova was the foil-lined installation of Objects of Common Interest who, with the help of the beloved Copenhagen design gallery Etage Project, turned an abandoned office into a lightbox that struck the contemporary art installation notes almost as heavy as it did those of industrial design. This ambiguity between space and object, function and theater, is exactly the vein of abstraction the cross-Atlantic design studio helmed by the Columbia University-trained architects Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis finds itself compelled to mine. Working remotely but in tandem from studios in Athens, Greece and New York respectively, the duo is preternaturally disposed to embracing the gray area between intention and chance.

In the case of their Alcova presentation, the composition was a medley of conceptually combustible ingredients including two of their totem-like Tube Lights, which streaked down from the high ceiling like bolts of lighting, acting both as a source of illumination for the windowless space but also as screen-like architectural interventions. Then, on the ground, there were a handful of their Metamorphic Rock stools in play, whose roller wheel equipped forms were infinitely rearranged by tides of visitors clamoring in, conjuring images of gumdrops and mountain ranges. It was only when you bothered to sit down on top of one of these rocks that you discovered they were almost gelatinous to the touch. These are the kind of surprises that Objects of Common Interest is always trying to bake into the familiar. “We believe in simplicity that hides layers of complexity in concept, process, and execution,” the duo shares. “We are excited by ideas that are everlasting and in creating temporary visions that live in memory.” Their Metamorphic Rocks certainly stuck with us all week.