“Where I was born there is a forest,” is Igor Lima’s very short bio for his Instagram profile. The phrase contains a good deal of understatement, considering that the Brazilian designer was born in Manaus, a city of over two million inhabitants looking over the waters of the Rio Negro, on the outskirts of the Amazonian Forest, the planet’s largest ‘green lung’: 6.7 million square kilometres of vegetation that is home to hundreds of animal species and many indigenous peoples.
In Lima’s work, the Amazonian Forest is a source of inspiration, from the unique patterns traced by the branches of the trees to the silhouettes of birds and insects that are found nowhere else in the world. It is an appeal to authenticity: “I began to think about my origins and how to incorporate them into my work during my studies, when I spent some time in Milan at the IED,” the designer tells us. “There, I realised that, like me, many international students were fascinated by Italian design, and when they returned home they tended to imitate it, or in any case repropose the same forms without trying to revise them to fit into their new context. And so I began to imagine what an authentically Amazonian design would be like, wondering how I could keep the collective and personal – the story of the forest and my childhood memories – on the same plane.” This in turn led to the idea of focusing on a living material steeped in memory like wood, looking around for lines and patterns to use as ideas for an original research work, the end result of which was some very contemporary furniture and furnishing complements.
And thus the movement of the console Rocca is reminiscent of the peculiar limestone formations eroded by the water in President Figueiredo’s village, the ‘waterfall paradise’ in the State of Amazonas. The bookshelf Grafismos, a weave of curved horizontal and vertical lines, is inspired by the tangle of branches and lianas in the thick forest, defining a charming complexity, while the stool Capibara winks an eye at the ceremonial benches used by some indigenous tribes in their rituals. The circular top of the coffee table Aranha testifies to the designer’s fascination with giant Amazonian water lilies, with leaves reaching a diameter of three metres that can support the weight of a child. Its legs, on the other hand, are thin and segmented, like those of spiders. Both the name and the structure of the bench Centopeia, its seats made from four modular elements, recall the Amazonian giant centipede, a carnivorous scolopendra that lives in damp environments like the rainforest and can eat even bats.
Everything, or almost, of Igor Lima’s design seems to lead back to the unique Amazon ecosystem, with one exception. The raw material, wood, comes from certified renewable sources much further south than Manaus, in the south-eastern and central-western regions of Brazil. “Most of the State of Amazonas is covered by forests, but there is very little wood produced sustainably and what there is, is generally reserved for local consumption,” the designer explains. “This is why I chose not to use it in my studio.”
