rewriting a place already written, making in a place already made

Every place gets assigned a role, Some places get to revise theirs. Bali's was assigned from outside, and early: a landscape of culture, nature, and hospitality, held in a particular relationship to tradition that others have found useful to maintain. The expectation is not enforced by any single institution. It operates through tourism, through market demand, through what gets celebrated and what gets ignored. What it produces, over time, is a context in which the people who live and make here are expected to hold the aesthetic steady, while others arrive free to do whatever they want with it. We make things from inside that condition.

Craft from Bali is expected to look a certain way: visibly handmade, culturally marked, close to tradition. There is real skill in that, and we don't dismiss it. But an expectation, held long enough, stops describing a place and starts prescribing it. And once it prescribes, it also limits what gets made, what gets recognised, what gets to count as design at all. We are more interested in what craft from here might become if that expectation were examined rather than fulfilled.

The same surface conditions, the uneven edge, the visible join, the irregular texture, can mean entirely different things depending on who produces them. In certain contexts, these are deliberate aesthetic choices, design positions taken from a place of full access and resources. In a context like ours, they can just as easily be the result of working within real constraint. What looks like a shared aesthetic conceals fundamentally different realities, and that difference rarely gets named.

Our response has been to question the expectation rather than work within it. Not to reject the tradition, but to ask what it actually contains. Underneath the aesthetic, underneath the visible marks of technique, there is something else: the intelligence accumulated in how materials behave, how methods respond to constraint, how making in a specific place leaves its knowledge in the things it produces. What does a material know? What has a traditional process figured out about constraint, about making, about the specific conditions of this place?

Working from Bali means working inside one of the most ecologically and culturally loaded landscapes in the world, where the tension between natural heritage and the pressures of development is not abstract but immediate. The terms of cultural preservation are largely set by those who don't bear the cost of it, and what gets romanticized as authentic is rarely decided by the people doing the preserving. We don't have a solution to that. But it makes certain questions harder to ignore when we're deciding what to make and what to make it from.

Craft, for us, is not a practice of preservation. It is a practice of translation: taking what a material or a traditional method knows, the intelligence encoded in its behaviour, its relationship to constraint, its accumulated responses to making, and asking what new structural forms that intelligence might become.

Our practice approaches this translation from different directions. With ALAS, the inquiry begins by borrowing the construction logic of a curtain blind and inverting its purpose, assembled by hand but reads as industrial. The Espresso Chair begins elsewhere: with discarded matter, and with the harder question of how to engineer a system that makes it reproducible and scalable beyond the studio. One recontextualizes a method. The other takes on a problem craft has always lived with but rarely examined directly: making in multiples, which in many ways is what craft is. But the thinking required to make repetition possible, to design a process rigorous enough that the tenth object holds the same integrity as the first, is rarely where the attention goes. The material gets the credit. The system that makes it repeatable stays invisible.

Working inside that condition is where ngakalin becomes the only honest description of what the work requires. An everyday Indonesian term for finding unconventional paths when standard infrastructure is absent, it operates in our practice not as a strategy but as the natural state of making here. This has produced fabrication methods that exist nowhere else, because the problems that generated them were specific to this work, this context, these materials. Workarounds, developed with enough rigour, become methodology. The aesthetic that emerges comes from how problems get solved rather than what "handmade" is expected to look like.

When craft from places like ours is assumed to operate through inherited skill and manual repetition rather than intellectual rigour, claiming authorship becomes structurally difficult. What gets framed as "traditional technique" or "artisanal labour" is valued for execution rather than problem-solving. The discipline, the sustained engagement with constraint, the adaptive methods, the thinking, all of it remains invisible while only the hand and its visible marks are recognised. That invisibility is not neutral. It determines how the work gets classified, how it gets valued, and who gets credited for the decisions inside it.

Every place gets assigned a role. What is less settled is what happens when the people making inside that place begin to ask different questions of it — not to refuse the assignment outright, but to work with enough rigour and intention that the assignment starts to look like only one of several possibilities. Whether that constitutes revision, or whether revision requires something the work alone cannot do, is a question we haven't resolved. What we know is that the objects keep proposing it.

^^^^^^ A system for transforming organic waste into durable, modular seating

The Espresso Chair begins with a material problem specific to this place. Indonesia is one of the world's largest coffee producers, and spent coffee grounds are abundant and largely discarded. The question wasn't whether the material could be used, that has been asked before, but whether it could be made consistent enough to produce, reliable enough to sell, and resolved enough to last.

The process takes its formal logic from the espresso puck: pressure applied to an organic mass to produce something dense, uniform, and structurally coherent.

The result is C-Foam, a composite that behaves like cork, firm and slightly responsive to body weight, stable under use. Achieving that consistency without industrial pressing equipment required iterative testing of compression ratios, binder formulations, and curing conditions across a material that resists uniformity by nature. The frame is hand-welded stainless steel, chosen on its own terms. Two resolved materials brought together without hierarchy.

The chair flat-packs, stacks, and assembles with basic tools. A small hook integrated into the backrest addresses the overlooked problem of bag storage in public seating, one detail that makes the object more honest about how people actually use chairs. The moulded components are conceived as a system rather than a fixed typology, seat and backrest units reconfigurable into future forms, a logic already extended in the Espresso Stool, which repurposes the same backrest component as a seat.

photo credit : dodik cahyendra
^^^^^^A lighting object investigating structural flexibility in rigid materials

Alas borrows its construction logic from a curtain blind: the way it pleats, segments, rolls, and holds a shape. Where a blind manages light by blocking it, Alas becomes its source, and that inversion is the proposition. 

Every segment is assembled by hand because the construction logic makes automation impossible without either prohibitive investment or technology that doesn't yet exist for this application. The challenge wasn't the form but achieving genuine flexibility in wood veneer, a material that resists it, while concealing LED wiring and electrical connections across the entire length with no hinges, no exposed cables, and no visible evidence of how the flexibility was obtained. The solutions came through iterative jig-making, material testing, and fabrication sequences developed specifically for this object.

When unlit, Alas reads as solid wood. When activated, the veneer becomes translucent, revealing discrete LED points beneath the surface. The visible dotted pattern is considered, but the achievement is what remains invisible: a fully integrated electrical system inside a flexible wooden structure, produced entirely by hand through accumulated craft intelligence, in the absence of the manufacturing infrastructure that would otherwise make a result like this legible.