Set inside the historic Kuglegården naval depot at the recent 3 Days of Design Copenhagen, the FAST / FORWARD exhibition by Fenix and Formica, curated by design consultant Federica Sala, might have looked at first like a lesson in material futures. But the brief to the studios of Federica Biasi, Laurids Gallée, Panter&Tourron, Tino Seubert, Uchronia, and South Africa’s Thabisa Mjo — to reinterpret a design decade — became something else entirely: a gentle reckoning with the past.
Mjo’s piece, titled “01000010 00110010 01000110 — Back to the Future”, was a standout in the exhibition, which featured each of the designers’ responses to a moment in design history in terms of surface, form, and reinterpretation. Mjo took the 1920s and 1930s — decades known for their Art Deco flourish and early futurist aspirations — and flipped the reference.
“We are living in the future that designers in the Art Deco era imagined,” she says. This is that moment, realised.
The result is a cabinet that reads like a relic from a parallel timeline: elegant, sculptural, slightly coded. High-gloss Formica Calacatta Marble and Jet Sequoia ripple across the façade in Deco-like symmetry, contrasted with the soft-matte tactility of Fenix Nero Ingo and Piombo Doha, creating a layered visual rhythm of deep black, cream, and graphite. It’s moody but playful. A slow burn.
There’s something inherently cinematic about it — a piece that might appear in a retro-futurist film set or the living room of a Joburg-based collector in 2045. But it also feels deeply personal. The title, rendered in binary code, is a wink to early computing and a reminder that progress, in design and elsewhere, is never linear.
Mjo’s work has always walked the line between craft and concept, from her award-winning Tutu 2.0 lamp to her recent collaborations with the likes of Dolce & Gabbana, and this cabinet continues that lineage. It’s a piece that holds memory and motion in equal parts. And in a show full of polished prototypes and chromatic optimism, it brought something richer: time, tension, and tactility.
In a quiet corner of Copenhagen, this South African designer offered not just a vision of what design was or what it could be, but what it already is.
From the July edition of Wanted, 2025
