When was the last time you watched a ping-pong match at a design fair, let alone queued up ‘80s Moroccan rock music on a jukebox at one? Ducking out of the midday sun and into Mexico City’s Expo Reforma Center last week, visitors to the third edition of Unique Design X paused to marvel at Karolina Ciecholewska’s 17-arm chandelier—a composition of thousands of porcelain toy soldiers and an exploration of power and conflict. But it wasn’t long before their eyes drifted to a flurry of movement to the right, where James De Wulf demoed his own work: an acoustic-panelled ping-pong table that literally sent each ball singing with every swing.
All of Unique Design X, the internationally nomadic design fair, seemed like a proving ground for the fair’s bold nomenclature. “This edition showcases our long-term vision of truly pulling in different aspects of the creative sector that work around the object, in a beautiful gray area in the middle of fashion and architecture and contemporary art and even in some sometimes pure design,” Unique Design X Group founder Morgan Morris told Surface from Expo Reforma. “This year, we were really able to bring in more of those participants from those different areas in a very coherent way.”
For proof, we didn’t have to look farther than Guadalajara-based Occidente Galería, whose debut showcase of furniture and design objects included pieces from Tatiana Bilbao, one of Mexico’s most venerated living architects, and multidisciplinary artist Jose Dávila, who is also a trained architect. The intersection of architecture and object design is something, Morris says, “that we want to delve more into, because we feel that architects have a sensibility for the object that is very, very special.”
Returning to Unique Design X this year was Esteban Tamayo, whose practice spans art, fashion design, and industrial design. The futuristic slant of his fashion label, Tiempo, has caught the eyes of hypebeasts and Bella Hadid, and at Unique Design X, he presented a collection of chrome-coded lighting and seating that wouldn’t have been out of place in Tiempo’s space-age showroom located just off of Mexico City’s stately Avenida de la Reforma. “He’s really one of our great talents of the new, up-and-coming generation,” Morris said of the creative, who assembled a pop-up shop of musical and cultural ephemera for the fair.
Beyond diversity of creative practice, this edition of the fair also saw an influx of first-time exhibitors who live and work between multiple cities around the world. One of whom was Gaïa Matisse, whose booth featured painted ceramic tableaux by Ugo Schildge, totemic marble sculptures from Sten Studio, and a breakout design collection from Studio Lares. Having been born in Paris and traveled between there and New York, Matisse now calls Mexico City home. “I think that living here has really allowed me a freedom to think and be able to present things in a new way,” Matisse told Surface, emphasizing the quality of the country’s artisanship, and the speed with which commissions come to fruition. “Really, in Mexico City,” she said, “it’s a place where anything is possible.”
