Vozes - Cristián Mohaded: curated by Ana Carolina Ralston

Before it is written down, a technique is told. It passes from one generation to the next through words, observation, and gesture, from one body to another, from one hand to another. For centuries, artisanal knowledge has travelled through time in this way, preserved not in manuals, but in the memory of those who have learned to recognize a fiber, stretch a thread, cut a piece of wood, or repeat a gesture until it becomes knowledge in its own right.

There are many voices in the work of Cristián Mohaded. Some belong to the countless artisans with whom the Argentine designer has collaborated throughout his career. Others come from the territories he travels through and the cultures he encounters. And there are those that are quieter still, seeming to emerge from the materials themselves — from their resistance, imperfections, memories, and possibilities. For Mohaded, creating perhaps begins precisely with listening. This act of listening inevitably shifts the idea of authorship. If each object carries within it a multiplicity of hands, gestures, and forms of knowledge, where does the designer’s work end and the artisan’s begin? For Mohaded, this boundary seems increasingly blurred — and it is precisely within this shared space that his work takes shape. By making visible the names, faces, and stories of those with whom he works, the designer does not relegate them to the margins of his creation, but acknowledges their presence as a constitutive part of it.

Upon entering Casa Zalszupin, in São Paulo, Mohaded’s work encounters a house that also preserves its own words. Within its spaces, different times and geographies of Latin American design draw closer: the research of Jorge Zalszupin, deeply connected to the possibilities of materials and the development of Brazilian furniture, meets Mohaded’s own investigations. Both share an understanding of design that emerges from encounters with artisanal knowledge. If Zalszupin recognized in Brazilian woods a field for exploring forms, curves, joinery, and new construction possibilities, Mohaded extends this attentive listening to the materials and knowledge of the territories he travels through. In both, matter appears not merely as a means of realizing a previously conceived idea: it takes part in the process, offers possibilities, and imposes its own limits. The house thus becomes more than a setting for this encounter — it is the place where two investigations, separated by time and by different regions, reveal points of convergence.

It is through wood that one of these dialogues is established, setting the exhibition in motion. In Entropia, developed in collaboration with ETEL, Mohaded begins with fragments of different wood species accumulated throughout the production processes of the Brazilian company, which arrive in the work bearing the marks of a previous existence. Rather than erasing their differences in order to subject them to a homogeneous form, the designer works with them in partnership with the very woodworkers Junior Ferreira dos Santos, Savio Feitosa Pereira, and Valdomiro Manoel de Souza, as well as polisher Robson Luiz A. Correa, all from ETEL. Grain patterns, hues, densities, and imperfections become part of the composition. There is a design, but there is also that which escapes the design; there is intention, but room remains for the material body to respond.

In Entrevero, this memory tells a story of Argentine territory. Initiated through extensive research by Mohaded across different regions of his country of origin, the series of furniture and objects emerges less as a closed collection than as an ongoing investigation, shaped through encounters with techniques, landscapes, and, above all, the people who hold and transmit this knowledge. The name itself offers a key to understanding it. Entrevero means mixture, crossing, that which takes shape when different bodies or elements meet and become intertwined. Mohaded seems to carry this idea into his very way of creating. Artisanal methods, industrial processes, and contemporary design come to occupy the same field, without the need to erase the singularity of each. More than incorporating craftsmanship into design, he is interested in exploring what can emerge from the relationship between different forms of knowledge.

Entrevero thus becomes a way of traversing and reading the deeper Argentina. Each element carries a history of transmission; each artisan, a form of knowledge built through experience and gesture. The space that emerges from this journey is neither singular nor homogeneous, but composed of many voices. And it is through the encounter between them — between what is inherited, what is learned, and what is transformed — that Mohaded constructs his own language. In ceramics, this encounter takes place with Santiago Lena and, in leather, with Jerónimo Coll, bringing Mohaded’s contemporary design closer to artisanal techniques transmitted through making. The material carries not only its physical properties, but also a history of gestures, uses, and knowledge that precedes the object itself.

This language seems to acquire an almost organic dimension in Protomorfosis. Originally presented at the Museo Emilio Caraffa, in Córdoba, in 2023, the series stems from an investigation into origin and transformation, giving form to objects that seem to inhabit an intermediate stage between what already exists and what is yet to come. Fruits, branches, and roots take part in the construction of these imagined species, in which nature ceases to be merely a reference and becomes a constitutive part of the work. Their irregular and unrepeatable forms guide the design, while the knowledge of master artisans Renzo Galeano and Norma Álvarez contributes to bringing them into being. Once again, creating means negotiating: between what the material offers and what the hand transforms, between nature and culture, between art, craftsmanship, and design. Not by chance, Mohaded associates Protomorfosis with the possibility of generating new worlds and new dialogues between these fields.

While Entrevero and Protomorfosis remain firmly rooted in Argentine territory, other collaborations extend this cartography beyond its borders. In rugs and tapestries, the weave becomes a language: threads intersect, techniques overlap, and the design takes shape through knowledge belonging to other Latin American regions. In the collaboration with the Colombian brand Verdi, it is once again the thread that guides the narrative. Fibers, weaves, and knowledge transmitted through manual practice give rise to rugs and tapestries in which the design unfolds in dialogue with materials deeply connected to Colombian territory. In the Lazo series, developed in partnership with Lara Lladhon, it is the handloom that guides this encounter. The design emerges from interlacing, from the repeated gesture that transforms thread into surface and makes the time invested in its execution a silent dimension of the work.

Perhaps it is possible to consider Mohaded’s work through what anthropologist Tim Ingold understands as a form of making that does not impose form, but follows flows and responds to the possibilities of its materials. Creating, in this sense, is less about determining than about corresponding: perceiving what already exists, entering into a relationship, and allowing the encounter to transform what we had imagined producing. In the works brought together in this exhibition, materials, techniques, territories, and people do not appear as elements subordinated to a single authorship, but as presences that take part in the construction of form. There are many hands, many stories, many times, many voices. And the work of Cristián Mohaded comes into being precisely when we learn to listen to them.

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