Salina Collection
Salina Collection is a minimalist furniture and lighting series created by Mexico City-based designer Federico Stefanovich during Mexico Art Week 2026. Stefanovich builds a formal vocabulary from underwater morphologies – not through direct mimicry but by extracting structural principles from marine organisms. The collection translates skeletal frameworks and protective carapaces into furniture that exists between the mineral and the biological, capturing the precarious equilibrium found in tidal ecosystems where forms must be simultaneously delicate and resilient. This tension between fragility and structural integrity becomes the defining characteristic of each piece.
The studio employs fiberglass as both material and methodology, using its capacity for compound curves to generate volumes that resist orthogonal logic. 3D-printed molds establish base geometries, but the real design intelligence emerges in the finishing process. Hand-worked surfaces retain evidence of their making – micro-bubbles trapped in resin, texture variations where material thickness shifts, subtle warping that occurs as layers cure. These inconsistencies function as design features rather than manufacturing flaws, embracing what Stefanovich frames as controlled imperfection. The approach recalls postwar Italian experimentalists like Carlo Mollino, who similarly used emerging materials to pursue organic forms that industrial processes could approximate but never fully standardize.
Light transforms the collection from static objects into atmospheric devices. Fiberglass possesses inherent translucency that varies with wall thickness, creating gradients of opacity across each form. Where material thins at edges or curves sharply, illumination intensifies, mapping structural logic through luminosity. The effect suggests bioluminescence – that quality of marine organisms to reveal their anatomical frameworks through self-generated light. Lighting pieces in the collection make this relationship explicit, but even the tables demonstrate how material density modulates ambient light, casting shadows that emphasize volumetric complexity.
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