Lola Rollandi y Sabrina Saladino:
Speaking Systems
S.S. Lola and I have known each other for many years. We were both trained in industrial design. Our friendship and the spaces we shared led us naturally to collaborate on each other’s projects, always as a way of consulting one another, seeking new perspectives or opinions. Item emerged from something that had been happening informally, sporadically, between us. We shaped it as a project that could embrace each of our concerns, within our practices, allowing us to approach them together.
L.R. What we usually say is that it began as an exploratory exercise. A kind of parallel path to our independent professional practices -a shared space where we could experiment with and test materials, processes and techniques. Over the past few years, we’ve started to give it a little more structure, which is part of the project that brings us here.
What does it mean to think of a piece as part of a system rather than as an isolated object?
L.R. Partly because of our training, we’ve always thought of pieces as belonging to a system. We think of them as scalable elements that can transform into different things, at different scales and in different materials, and adapt to different spaces.
We approach things with a certain flexibility and capacity for scalability, whether in terms of quantity or dimensions. In this case, we also thought of the pieces as a system or collection: a family inspired by the Kavanagh Building, taking a single element from the wide range of inputs it offered us and allowing it to interact with the pieces we didn’t know -the work of the other designers.
S.S. Exactly. There’s something almost intrinsic to our practice when we’re responding to a need, whether it’s an open call, a project or a commissioned work. We think about a family of objects that can respond to that need, rather than an isolated object. We rarely think about a single piece. It’s more about creating a universe of elements.
How does collaborative work unfold, from the beginning of an idea through its production?
S.S. In our case, the collective aspect happens very naturally because we work extensively with outsourced production processes. We’re constantly collaborating, whether it’s with the people who manufacture the pieces or with those we engage in conversations about how to bring an idea into reality. The inclusion of other actors in the creative process happens out of necessity, but also because that’s how we conceive of things, objects and pieces: within spaces that belong to other people or in production workshops. We try to build things together.
How do you observe everyday gestures and needs when developing an object?
L.R. Our background and expertise are more closely connected to functional objects, so it’s difficult for us to detach ourselves from the question of utility. We tend to work in the world of furniture, lighting and small household objects.
Item emerged as a parallel path for exploring other ways of finding utility -objects that inhabit space differently, offering another perspective. Perhaps by making their context slightly strange. But there is always an anchor point in the relationship with users.
S.S. It also has a great deal to do with our everyday practice and our projects. There are always things that remain in the background -interests or triggers that perhaps don’t find their focus, or a way of materialising themselves, within our day-to-day work. So we ask Item to explore and develop those ideas.
To solve them?
S.S. Exactly. To find the place where they belong.
How do local manufacturing possibilities influence the design decisions you make?
L.R. I think that’s one of the most interesting questions, at least within our practice. We make production conditions part of our identity. The starting point is always an idea of the resources available to us and how we can make use of them -not in terms of optimisation or a strictly functionalist approach, but by trying to find a poetic quality within the most everyday things.
A designer’s education and professional life leads them to spend a great deal of time out in the world, engaging with workshops in the suburbs, in hardware shops, on pavements, with people, building-material suppliers… Quite often, we find the answers to our questions there.
Not in such a DIY way, but by using what we find as an input for constructing something else. The same applies to workshops. What they might consider an error or a production flaw, we take and incorporate as the most prominent element of one of our products.
There’s a great deal of back and forth between the manufacturing process, ourselves and other colleagues. A constant circulation of information and experimentation.
S.S. Keeping our antennae open, being very attentive to what’s around us. Solutions and ways of resolving projects come from all sorts of places, and for us they’re often right there in plain sight. There’s no secret to them -they’re simply there. We pick them up and use them to solve things in a very direct way.
What elements do you think have contributed to building a recognisable language for the studio -that domestic poetics of searching, of working with what is available, and of moving through the errors you encounter within a design system? I liked what you said about “making the domestic strange”, but from a very loving, genuine place. Do you recognise what that language is? If you had to give it a single word today, what would it be?
L.R. It’s difficult for me to reduce it to a single word, but I think it has to do with using the standard or the everyday in a dialectical way. Making the standard strange, putting it to work alongside other elements.
S.S. We’ve gone around the subject a few times, and at one point we settled on the terms industrial fantasy or resource as ways of defining our practice. Calling upon improbable or dreamlike worlds using resources that are available and belong to local industry -things that hold no particular secret, but which inspire us the most. They lead us into a world of fantasy and allow us to think about all sorts of things through what is already there, what we can see around us.
What scales, uses or systems would you be interested in exploring further in the future?
L.R. All of them. At the moment, we’re exploring different scales, thinking about making some site-specific pieces, things that might engage more directly with architecture, while at the same time working on much smaller objects.
S.S. Our search isn’t so much dependent on scale as on the ideas we have and the forms they can take. In a way, Item isn’t defined by a typology or a material, but by a process. I think that process can apply equally to a large scale -which is something we’re interested in exploring at the moment- or to more sculptural pieces that intervene in space in a more imposing way.
But we’re also excited by small-scale solutions that allow us to challenge a certain habit, and work with a little more detail.
What did your practice find in the Kavanagh that gave rise to the proposal you developed for this project?
L.R. The urban landscape of Buenos Aires is one of our most important sources of inspiration. From the highly elevated -the kind of architecture represented by this building, which is a work of art- to the most everyday, pedestrian aspects of the city.
This project was an infinite repertoire of possibilities. Eventually, we focused on the entrance to the building from Florida. I think it captures many of the characteristic elements of Art Deco: the stepped forms, that zigzag divided into three, the symmetry… We tried to extrapolate those elements into the tables. We created a module with that little staircase-like form and used it to construct a kind of morphological language, in which forms intersect and gradually assemble into different pieces. Simple devices that allow us to explore combinations within the morphology or functionality, while also allowing us to make decisions about certain details that relate more directly to ornamentation, or to the combination of different materials and the way they interact to form the finished pieces.
Would you like to tell us something about the materials? Is this the first time you’ve used this material?
L.R. At your suggestion, we incorporated uncoated sheet metal, which is something we’d never used before. We work quite a lot with aluminium and steel sheets in our other projects, but we had never used galvanised sheet metal. In this case, it was particularly interesting because it introduced a patina of imperfection and irregularity to the sheet, which helped connect it more closely to the building, to a materiality with greater depth.
And the acrylic?
S.S. The acrylic gives us a degree of transparency. It allows us to play with the idea of translucency in an element that perhaps doesn’t necessarily need to be transparent, but which becomes more interesting because it is.If the whole thing had been made from sheet metal, it might have ended up feeling too uniform, like a heavier block. Giving it this lid, which rises slightly above the base, gives the object another dimension.
L.R. Yes, there’s a more architectural device at work, with different depths -almost as if it were a small building.
11/08/2026
17:30 HRS
Photo credits:
Emma Livingston
(LOLA ROLLANDI Y SABRINA SALADINO)
Ítem is a design studio founded in Buenos Aires in 2019 by industrial designers Lola Rollandi and Sabrina Saladino. Its practice centres on the analysis and exploration of the local urban landscape, its architecture and the historical processes that have shaped Argentina’s productive fabric. The studio explores the relationships between design, art, material culture and identity, placing particular emphasis on practices that emerge from alternative contexts, while also embracing the potential of irony and humour.
LOLA ROLLANDI
Industrial Designer, FADU–UBA. She worked at Estudio Federico Churba for ten years, where she was responsible for the design and development of new products. Her practice combines a sculptural sensibility with material subtlety and a strong technical knowledge.
SABRINA SALADINO
Industrial Designer, FADU–UBA. She has maintained an independent practice since 2014, focusing on objects, lighting and equipment. Her work is rooted in material experimentation and dialogue with local industry. A design lecturer since 2015, she currently teaches at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.