REVIEW – SALONE DEL MOBILE 2022: SALONESATELLITE
Diverse in the future

The lucky winner of this year's Salone Satellite Award is Lani Adeoye from Nigeria, who was awarded by the jury for the RemX walking aid. "Elegance and dignity meet in an object that can be useful to everyone," the jury said. With RemX, Adeoye has succeeded in "combining local processes with global design inspiration." Just like her collection of seating furniture, side tables and lamps called Ekaabo, the Lagos-based designer has the walking aid made in Nigeria by local craftsmen. In doing so, she brings together various traditional techniques and develops them further. Lani Adeoye was born in London and grew up in Lagos, later her family immigrated to Canada. She studied interior design in New York. Ekaabo is Yoruba and means welcome, the designer wants to pay homage to West African hospitality with her collection.

The stand of Aino Michelsen at the Salone Satellite, the newcomer platform of the Salone del Mobile, looked very clear and tidy. The Finnish designer with her own studio in Helsinki had brought a chair and a side table made of wood with her - but the two pieces of furniture, so simple at first glance, have a lot going for them. They can be easily assembled and disassembled in the tradition of "knock-down furniture". The individual parts can be packed flat and shipped accordingly. A small, white pendant lamp also hung inconspicuously between the pieces of furniture. It comes from a research project by Michelsen, who is currently experimenting with a material made of paper and wool. The designer did her master's degree at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen and participated in the Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale.

As it seems, The (un)ordinary Chair by Anna Koppmann is an ordinary dining table chair. Made of wood, with four legs and a backrest, that's how it stood in the show "Forest Tales", which was on display at the Milan exhibition house Triennale. But the chair violates the unwritten laws of carpentry because it is made of three different types of wood, recognisable by the different colours of the parts. In this way, Koppmann takes into account the fact that mixed forests are healthier and more resistant than monocultures of individual tree species. The piece was created in cooperation with the American Hardwood Export Council Europe (AHEC). The Berlin designer is also currently working with her colleague Marie Radke to bring the First Aid Gloves project to series production: Disposable gloves for emergencies that are printed with first aid instructions. For this, the two are receiving a start-up grant from the Berlin University of the Arts.

Carina Deuschl from Munich also exhibited for the first time at the Salone Satellite. However, she had already applied to take part in 2020 - the pandemic also thoroughly thwarted the plans of the young designers. But the trained interior designer has used the relative calm of the past two years to work out her ideas and develop new designs. At the same time, she has been teaching and implementing interior design projects. At Satellite 2022, Deuschl now showed several furniture designs, including the height-adjustable Orca desk and a matching shelving system based on plug-in connections. Also a pendant lamp called Balance and the compact tubular steel chair You. You is available as a three- and four-legged chair, with a plastic seat and backrest. Thanks to the Y-shaped incisions, the plastic parts yield under the weight of the user:inside and thus offer unexpected seating comfort. The eye-catcher at the stand: the greedily money-devouring money box Moneymonster.

No screw, no glue, that's what Italian Anna Arpa promised with her stand at the Salone Satellite. The trained architect has devoted herself entirely to wood as a material and designed a series of ingenious pieces of furniture that are held together with plug-in connections alone. The fact that the wood will shrink over the years was taken into account in Arpa's design. In addition, a wild zig-zag caught the eye at her stand, both a table top and some of the details flickered in the multi-coloured pattern. However, there is more behind this decorative effect: Milanese Anna Arpa has made it her business to reuse leftovers from furniture production. To do this, she glued together solid pieces of ten different types of wood into panels in the herringbone style and used them to make her designs. This was Arpa's first time at Satellite; she developed the collection during the pandemic.

An interchangeable frame for photos and pictures - this is what won designer Alexandra Gerber the renowned Swiss Design Prize last year. Actually, it is a rather marginal product, but Gerber has given it a subtle wit with her design: She has the glass pane coated with a coloured frame, like the ones we know from car windscreens. "Untitled" was now on show in Milan, in the presentation "Design Switzerland's Living Spaces" organised by the Pro Helvetia Cultural Foundation. The frame is available in various sizes, colours and with different print motifs; Gerber sells it herself via an online shop. The designer comes from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and has a master's degree in product design from Ecal University. She has lived in London for several years and has worked for Tom Dixon, among others. Her work also includes the Up shelving system, the study of a lamp for corner situations and custom-made shelves that she designed for a flat in London.