Armchairs made from rag dolls, sofas out of cardboard, chairs out of plastic packaging are just some of the offbeat creations that have made designers Humberto and Fernando Campana famous, their work featuring in the collections of top modern art institutions such as New York's MOMA museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Their inspiration: everyday, discarded objects from their colorful and chaotic homeland, Brazil.
One of their signature works, the "Favela," is an armchair made of shards of wood, resembling the shanty huts cobbled together by dwellers in Brazil's vast slums.
Theirs is an "urgent, spontaneous form of design," says Fernando, "reflecting a unique "Brazilian know-how."
Their "Red Armchair" was first made with 500 meters of red rope they found discarded in 1993. They wove it around a frame like a nest. "The idea for a project always originates in the materials," he adds. "We transform the banal into the sophisticated."
A chic Italian design firm discovered the brothers and the chair made the Campanas name, Humberto says. "That chair is our homage to chaos."
