With Alpi Wood, Stephen Burks Finds an Unexpected New Canvas for Kuba Textiles
At Design Miami, the craft-forward designer teamed with Alpi to bring intricate raffia palm patterns onto richly layered surfaces made of reconstituted wood
For The Lost Cloth Object, Stephen Burks Man Made’s standout installation at this year’s Design Miami, the craft-forward designer is looking back. First, to the ancient Kuba Kingdom, located in what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose residents innovated a raffia embroidery technique to create sacred textiles in hundreds of geometric patterns. He and Malika Leiper, partners in business and life, traveled to Kinshasa in June to research that artisanal history. Along the way, they made a documentary that will screen as part of an exhibition of Kuba textiles at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, next year.
Meanwhile, at this year’s Milan Design Week, he struck up an instant rapport with Vittorio Alpi, the president of his family’s legendary company that specializes in Italian artisanal wood veneers. Alpi sports a robust track record of artistic collaborations, from Ettore Sottsass’ grainy Memphis collection in the 1980s to Nendo’s recent recyclable blockbuster Futae Grey. Rather than resting on their laurels, Alpi was preparing its first presentation at Design Miami. “I was interested in trying to find ways to translate Kuba textile arts into wood,” Burks says.
With other designers, Alpi would typically create a new veneer first, and then figure out ideal applications. Burks turned this process on its head—or perhaps went straight for the heart and soul—by fashioning sculptures that nod to Italian Radical Design, like a floating platform with a thought-bubble-cum-curlique cutout, or ottomans with edges somehow both rough and smooth. Their shapes also bow to spiritual architecture: a partition is anchored in the back by a cross, and pierced in the front with a portal to focus the eye on the light. “It’s coming from our research into spirituality for the contemporary home,” he says. “It’s thinking of Kuba ceremonial rituals, but less a direct translation and more about setting up a situation where almost anything is possible.”
Including, in this case, a bold deployment of Alpi’s famed Legacy collection, which reincarnates endangered—or even disappeared—wood species like ebony, teak, rosewood, and zebrawood. “The reproduction of the same woods which were very important during the 1950s and ‘60s, when the woods were abundant,” Alpi says, “can now mean they are once again in abundant and FSC-certified supply.”
The Lost Cloth Object shows the fruit of such abundance, in which marquetry seems to fold like raffia cloth and settle into eye-popping arrangements of geometric motifs. “Most of the Kuba prestige cloths have multiple hands involved, and so what they’re doing is testing various motifs on a single cloth,” Burks says. “That’s sort of like what Alpi is doing, in terms of engaging designers to find new expressions.”
The furniture will be followed by a veneer product, Alpi explains, which takes the ancient Kuba inspiration into today’s world. “It can go to furniture, interior design, yachting,” he says. “Or even automotive dashboards. Anywhere where high-end wood surfaces are required.” Plans are clearly in motion, achieving an equipoise between learning histories and imagining potentials. “This is the first time that Alpi has worked in reverse,” Burks says. With results like this, it won’t be the last.