Fendi Collaborates with Designer Peter Mabeo on an Artful Furniture Collection

“Kompa implies ‘together,’ ” describes designer Peter Mabeo, who is based mostly in Gaborone, Botswana. To display that holistic strategy, Mabeo interlocks his fingers, developing a circle with his fingers. The phrase, which Mabeo uncovered from an artisan in the nearby village of Hukuntsi, is the name of his newest furnishings collection: 10 items built in collaboration with Italian vogue manufacturer Fendi and unveiled at Style Miami.

“I preferred to deliver jointly distinctive elements, distinctive products, and unique persons,” suggests Mabeo. Given that founding his namesake studio in 1997, he has been teaming up with a selection of Botswana-based makers, among the them master woodworkers, potters, basket weavers, and metalsmiths. For Kompa, he canvassed the nation by motor vehicle, tapping those similar experts to take a look at the limits of their mediums. In the local community of Mmankgodi, woodworkers employed regional Panga Panga timber to generate the squiggly Shiya seat and sculptural Maduo chair. (Bearing Fendi’s typical F symbol, the latter reinterprets a bracelet design by Delfina Delettrez Fendi, creative director of jewelry.) In Molepolole Village, ceramists packed clay into wood-and-metallic frameworks and pit-fired the sorts employing cow dung for fuel—an ancient method that lends the clay a leathery reddish tint. The ensuing Loma and efo stools, with complementary components that nestle into one particular one more, by the way, resemble Mabeo’s circular hand gesture.

Several pieces were being touched by numerous craftspeople right before they reached their remaining point out of kompa. Take the Foro chair, which Mabeo executed in wood as very well as ceramic. In purchase to comprehend its uncommon condition in clay, he enlisted metalworkers who normally flip scrap into buckets. They designed an elaborate mould that would guideline a ceramist’s hand in the constructing stages. To give some perception into that procedure at Layout Miami, Mabeo exhibited the seat however attached to the skeletal composition. (These same metalworkers also designed the Gabi-Gabi seating sculpture and a tiny matching lamp.) In the meantime, to produce the Chichira cabinet significantly north in Etsha, metalworkers produced a framework that some 20 basket weavers sheathed with palm leaves (you can scent their grassy aroma, even by means of a mask), all in advance of woodworkers installed drawers.

“I was straight away drawn to Peter’s considered strategy to variety and purpose, mixed with elements and artisanal tactics specific to his regional ecosystem,” clarifies Kim Jones, Fendi’s inventive director for womenswear and couture. Mabeo manufactured a issue to doc these networks of craft—and each individual unique artisan who touched the collection—in a publication that was offered in Miami. As Silvia Venturini Fendi, the brand’s creative director of extras, menswear, and young children, describes, “The work speaks not only about merchandise but about people.” fendi.com