Studio Campana’s Jalapão Chair Was Three Years in the Making

“Everyone Who Made This Happen” takes a look at the outsize teams of artists and creative types it often takes to produce a single work.

Number of people involved: 35.

Time from conception to completion: Three years.

While on a 2014 trip to Jalapão, a region in the central Brazilian state of Tocantins that’s known for its unlikely combination of springs and sand dunes, the furniture designer Humberto Campana, 71, purchased about 30 disks wound from the golden-hued stems of capim dourado, a grasslike plant native to the area. The disks, which are sometimes used as potholders, sat in his São Paulo studio for five years until he wondered whether they could be joined to make a kind of tapestry that could in turn become a chair. That chair ended up with a bowl-like seat fashioned from a lattice of double-sided circles — sheepskin cutouts in the front and capim dourado disks in the back — though arriving at the finished prototype took another nine months of tinkering.

Juliana Cacciatore, a former intern who’s now one of 20 full-time staffers at the Campana studio, connected the disks with silk threads. “She’s very patient, whereas I want to be very speedy,” Campana says. The disks are too fragile to be sat on directly, but Campana’s finance manager, Priscila Sanches, suggested reinforcing them with sheepskin; the task was undertaken by another studio worker, Deborah dos Santos. After Campana tested a few alternatives, dos Santos went with a caramel-colored variety that came — via a local leather supplier, Rodrigo Saragiotto of Casa de Couros Romeu — from sheep raised on farms in the country’s colder south. Then Julio César da Silva, the studio’s welder, made the chair’s rounded steel frame. Once it was finished, Cacciatore wove the legs in leather. Still, something was missing, so she added puffs of leather that appear to be secured by napkin rings of capim dourado, creating an undulating silhouette akin to that of a wire sculpture by the American artist Ruth Asawa.

Of course, before any of the studio work could happen, the people of Jalapão had to harvest the capim dourado. (Only those with a government-issued license are allowed to handle the protected plant.) Artisans within the community such as Maria do Carmo Pereira Vieira and Maria das Neves Ferreira then shaped the dried stems into the disks, sewing the spirals in place using industrialized threads or silk fibers from the leaves of the buriti, a palm tree that’s also indigenous to Brazil. Campana feels proud that by blending their work with his own, he’s promoting social responsibility, handicraft traditions and — even if he sees the chair as being in conversation with the 1960s-era rattan designs produced by the Italian company Bonacina — a uniquely Brazilian aesthetic. The piece also has sentimental value. That trip to Jalapão was one of the last big ones that Campana took with his brother and design partner, Fernando Campana, who died in 2022. And yet, says the designer, “Fernando’s still present in my creations because he’s in my dreams.” And the studio staff? “We are also a family.”

Photo assistant: Ênio Cesar