Bean Lamp by Hazel Villena – All photos are courtesy of the designer.
Design. At ICFF/Wanted Design fair, Peruvian-born and Brooklyn-based Hazel Villena presented the alien-like Bean Lamp – Not a piece made to fit a cultural brief, but one with its own distinct attitude. “Most objects wait to be used. The Bean Lamp is designed to hold its own character before it does its job.”
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A cast-metal body is paired with a soft, matte disc of light. Its legs function less as a conventional base and more as a posture, landing the piece somewhere between creature and machine. “I’m interested in objects charged with agency, where form and narrative make a functional piece feel like it has its own character and tells its story.”
On the challenges of being a Latin designer in New York, Hazel Villena is pragmatic rather than grieved. “A lot of what I find difficult in New York isn’t so much a Latin designer issue. I’m independent, funding my own production, with no institution behind me. That’s the reality for almost any emerging designer right now.” The obstacles, she suggests, are structural as much as cultural.
The Latin origin can actually be tricky. “There’s an increasing expectation that work by Latin designers should look visibly Latin, that it should obviously reference where we’re from with colors, motifs, or materials. If we don’t translate identity that literally we can be read as not-Latin-enough, or get pulled into conversations that center origin over object.”
It’s a tension Hazel Villena navigates with quiet confidence. “Latin designers have been shaping global design for a long time, so the shift isn’t that we’re new, but how we are being incorporated in the global discourse. My background shapes how I think and what I make, even when the object doesn’t directly point to it.”
“What feels encouraging is that work like that is increasingly being read on its concept and craft first, with the designer’s background as part of how the work is understood rather than how it’s introduced. I hope New York keeps moving in that direction.”
