Material Kinship

is a Franco-Mauritian designer who uses ephemeral and edible materials to give different meanings to matter. In her work Domestic Sugar, she explores caramel as a carrier of ancestral traces and connections, holding memory, continuity, and transformation within its material presence and malleability. The project engages with sugar’s colonial history of Mauritius while also merging the designer’s two countries of origin (Mauritius and France) into edible everyday pieces. Eating then becomes a way of knowing and an act of renewal through embodiment and digestion. A visceral love – so familiar in how eating can feel like loving as well as its opposite – that invites the broken collective to come back together, chewing up the old and re-making the everyday. 


[She will take part of We Will Design 2026 Exhibit during Milan Design Week with her project The Shape of Sugar.]

His artistic practice is rooted in his background as an industrial designer born and trained in Mexico, which gives him a critical lens to explore the modernist tradition and its colonial baggage in our understanding of what design is and looks like. Focusing on ornamentation in architecture, he blends industrial techniques with artisanal craftsmanship, using urban spaces to investigate how dominant ideologies have shaped collective identities and cityscapes. His solo show La Forma de la Tierra at Casa Wabi powerfully illustrates this approach: by adopting local materials and representative Mexican colors, Solano reappropriates colonial formal impositions through transformative dialogue and world-making, proposing hybrid aesthetics and original meanings that challenge historical design paradigms.


Her latest work, From Text to Clay explores the relationship between human and artificial intelligence through a material lens that seeks to humanize the gaze of AI while creating collaborative work that resists the fast pace of technology. By approaching both clay and AI through their inherent unpredictability, she frames this unpredictability as a form of collaboration rather than something to be controlled. Using a self-trained AI model built from emotionally annotated datasets of her earlier ceramic works, Vera prompts it with phrases such as “ceramic sadness,” generating sculptures that seem to exist but have never been made – forms that understand the aesthetics of clay but not its physical reality. These generated sculptures become invitations to wonder whether clay can gather and hold what the AI imagines, revealing how matter and meaning are gathered and shaped together in the unexpected intimacy that forms between human and machine, like two lovers whispering to each other their most hidden desires and fears.