Mexico City-based designer Fernando Laposse describes his practice as ‘endemic design’, in which materials and their historical and cultural ties to a particular location and its people take center stage. The result of extensive research, each discrete project is informative and educational, touching on topics such as sustainability, the loss of biodiversity, community dissolution, migration, and the negative impacts of global trade on local agriculture and food culture in Mexico. As a part of this research, his work often engages, and then imaginatively transforms, overlooked plant fibers, such as corn leaves, avocado skins, and sisal. Agave sisal, the discarded by-product of the tequila and mezcal industry, has fast become one of Laposse’s signature materials. Laposse has enlisted the medium to create an animated armchair, its rounded back and body, coated with the fiber, hugging a cotton-linen upholstered seat.

Materials: Agave fibers, upholstered cotton, plywood