STUDIO BANDA AT SALONESATELLITE 2026 — REWRITING A PLACE ALREADY MADE

Images courtesy of Studio Banda

From Indonesia to Milan
First publication April 28, 2026

For SaloneSatellite, part of Salone del Mobile.Milano 2026, Bali-based design practice Studio Banda, led by its co-founders, Cokorda Suryanata and Frans Sihombing, presents a body of work shaped as much by context as by material.

ALAS LAMP

Working from Bali means working within a place long assigned a role—defined through culture, craft, and hospitality, often framed by expectations set from the outside. Over time, these expectations have shaped not only how the place is seen, but also what is expected to be made within it. Craft becomes associated with a fixed visual language—handmade, traditional, culturally marked—valued for its familiarity as much as its execution.

ALAS LAMP

Rather than working within that expectation, the studio approaches its practice by questioning it—not to reject tradition, but to examine what lies beneath it: the intelligence embedded in materials, the logic of processes shaped by constraint, and the knowledge accumulated through making in a specific place.

Presented by Coulisse | INK

This inquiry unfolds through works such as the ALAS Lamp and the Espresso Chair & Stool. ALAS borrows the construction logic of a curtain blind—its ability to fold, segment, and hold form—reframed into a lighting object assembled by hand yet reading as industrial. The Espresso Chair begins with discarded coffee grounds, developed into a structural composite and engineered as a modular system that addresses not only form, but also reproducibility and scale.

ESPRESSO STOOL & CHAIR

Across these works, craft is approached not as preservation, but as translation—carrying forward the intelligence of materials and methods into new structural possibilities. The focus shifts beyond the visible marks of making to the systems behind it, where decisions, constraints, and processes quietly shape each outcome.

ESPRESSO STOOL & CHAIR

Within this context, the studio describes its process through the Indonesian term ngakalin—a way of navigating limitation through unconventional means, where workaround becomes methodology and shapes an aesthetic defined less by how craft is expected to look and more by how problems are resolved. At SaloneSatellite 2026, Studio Banda presents not a fixed statement, but an ongoing inquiry into what it means to make from within a place—and what becomes possible when that place is no longer taken as a given.

ESPRESSO STOOL & CHAIR