Across the evolving landscape of contemporary African design, a growing number of studios are moving beyond aesthetics and functionality to engage deeper questions around memory, spirituality, ancestry, and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Among the most compelling of these practices is Salù Iwadi Studio, founded by designers Toluwalase Rufai and Sandia Nassila. Operating between Lagos, Dakar, and Marrakech, the studio has steadily built a body of work that merges material experimentation, craft traditions, and architectural thinking with African cosmologies and inherited systems of meaning.
Rather than treating heritage as static archive material or decorative reference, Salù Iwadi Studio approaches cultural memory as something alive—something capable of shaping contemporary ways of living, building, and understanding space. Their projects move fluidly between collectible design, sculpture, installation, and spatial thinking, creating works that function not only as utilitarian objects but also as vessels of cultural continuity. Earlier projects such as the Zangbeto Side Table and Water Basin Totem established the studio’s interest in ritual presence, monumentality, and embodied histories, positioning them among a new generation of African designers reshaping the language of contemporary collectible design on their own terms.
This approach has increasingly drawn international attention. Recently recognized as Wallpaper* Future Icons, Rufai and Nassila continue to articulate a distinctly Pan-African design language rooted in collaboration across territories, materials, and inherited knowledge systems. Their work refuses simplistic narratives around “African design,” instead foregrounding complexity, regional specificity, and layered forms of cultural transmission. Whether through wood, brass, light, or spatial composition, the studio consistently explores how objects can preserve memory while remaining fully contemporary.
Their latest body of work, the Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ Lamp Collection, marks perhaps their most intimate and conceptually concentrated project to date. Unfolding across three sculptural lighting works—GLD01, GLD02, and GLD03—the collection draws from the Yoruba Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ tradition, a ceremonial system that publicly honours feminine authority, elder women, mothers, ancestors, and the generative forces that sustain communal life. Handcrafted between Lagos and Marrakech using carved oak wood and sand-cast brass, the lamps embody multiple histories of making across the African continent while treating light not merely as illumination, but as something living, held, nurtured, and gradually revealed. The collection will be presented as part of Ìmọ́lẹ̀, the studio’s first solo exhibition opening on 16 May at Atlantic Art Space in Ouidah, Benin. Africans Column spoke with Toluwalase Rufai and Sandia Nassila about the philosophy behind Salù Iwadi Studio, the responsibilities of working with inherited knowledge systems, the conceptual foundations of the Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ Lamp Collection, and how light evolved from a functional material into a spiritual and emotional language within their practice.
Africans Column: Salù Iwadi Studio operates across Nigeria, Senegal, and beyond, engaging Yoruba and Indian Ocean cultural frameworks. How did your collaboration begin, and how would you define the core philosophy of the studio today?
Salù Iwadi Studio: Our collaboration began from a shared awareness that design could operate as a site of continuity rather than rupture. Coming from different yet resonant geographies across the African continent, we were both navigating questions of memory, transmission, and how cultural knowledge might persist through form.
Today, Salù Iwadi Studio functions as a space of translation, between past and present, between territories, between material and meaning. The work moves fluidly between object, space, and experience, but remains anchored in a singular intention: to engage heritage not as archive, but as a living system that continues to shape how we build, inhabit, and understand the world.
We see ourselves as a Pan-African studio, where borders are porous, and geographies are in dialogue. While our practice is currently rooted between West Africa and Morocco, we are deeply interested in expanding further across the continent, particularly towards East Africa and the Indian Ocean, territories that also hold personal and ancestral significance. This movement is not about expansion for its own sake, but about returning, again and again, to sites of cultural power, and allowing them to inform new forms of expression.
Africans Column: Your work consistently treats cultural memory as something living and active rather than archival. What responsibilities come with working so closely with inherited knowledge systems, and how do you navigate that in your practice?
Salù Iwadi Studio: To work with inherited knowledge is to work with something that is already complete. It does not require reinvention, but careful engagement. Our responsibility lies in approaching these systems with precision, understanding their internal logic rather than extracting their surface. These traditions hold complex structures of balance, power, and transmission, and the challenge is to translate those structures without simplifying them. The work must remain porous enough to carry meaning but restrained enough to avoid illustration.
At the core of the studio, is “Iwadi”, which in Yoruba can be understood as “a return to the source,” a process of inquiry, of going back to move forward. Research is therefore not a phase of our work, but a foundational layer. It informs how we approach materials, forms, and narratives, allowing each piece to emerge from a deeper cultural and historical grounding.
Our responsibility is not only to represent inherited knowledge, but to engage it with care, depth, and integrity, ensuring that it remains alive, complex, and capable of continuing its transmission through contemporary forms.
Africans Column: The Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ Lamp Collection is grounded in a tradition that honors the power of women as central to social balance and continuity. What drew you to this particular tradition, and why did it feel important to engage with it now?
Salù Iwadi Studio: The Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ tradition offers a profound acknowledgment of the role of women as generative and regulatory forces within society. What is often described as the “power of mothers” is not symbolic, it is structural. Engaging with it now felt necessary, as these frameworks are becoming less visible in contemporary life. The collection became a way to re-situate that understanding within the present, allowing it to exist not only as ceremony, but as something lived with.
It also holds a personal dimension. In many ways, the work is an acknowledgment of our own mothers, that have both carried three children, in the same way the GLD01 carries three vessels, and the role they have played in shaping us, in carrying and nurturing life, and in holding forms of strength and knowledge that often remain unseen. The lamps, through their contained and emerging light, become a quiet reflection of that generative power, the act of holding, forming, and bringing light into the world.
Africans Column: You describe the collection as sculptural, but it also feels deeply symbolic—almost ritualistic. At what point did light shift from being a functional element to a conceptual and emotional material within your work?
Salù Iwadi Studio: The shift occurred when we began to understand light as something that holds presence rather than simply producing visibility.
In Yoruba thought, Ìmólè speaks to spiritual radiance, to destiny, to the presence of ancestors within the living world. From that point, light became something that could be carried, regulated, and revealed. The work began to explore illumination as a temporal condition, something that emerges through care, rather than something that is immediately given.
Africans Column: Each piece—GLD01, GLD02, and GLD03—draws from forms such as the womb, calabash, and orí. How did you arrive at these archetypes, and what layers of meaning are embedded within them?
Salù Iwadi Studio: These forms were approached not as symbols, but as systems of thought. The womb and the calabash are not simply shapes, they are spaces that protect, transform, and regulate what they contain. The orí is not merely the head, but the seat of consciousness and destiny.
These logics translated directly into the objects: dense, closed forms; weight carried internally; light embedded rather than exposed. The meaning is not applied onto the object, it is structured into how the object holds, filters, and releases.
Africans Column: Traditionally, Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ exists as a public, performative practice. Your lamps, however, live within intimate, domestic spaces. How does this movement from communal ritual to private encounter reshape the meaning of the work?
Salù Iwadi Studio: It shifts the temporality of the encounter. Within ritual, the experience is collective and episodic. Within the home, it becomes continuous and intimate. The object is no longer something you witness, it becomes something you live alongside.
In the context of Ìmọ́lẹ̀, our first solo show opening on May 16 at Atlantic Art Space in Ouidah, this dynamic expands again. The exhibition creates a shared environment where these intimate objects re-enter a collective space, allowing for both personal and communal readings to coexist.
Africans Column: The lamps appear to hold, filter, and gradually release light, almost as an act of care or containment. How important was it for the physical behavior of the objects to embody the philosophy behind them?
Salù Iwadi Studio: It was fundamental. The philosophy could not exist separately from the object, it had to determine its behavior.
The lamps do not emit light in a direct or immediate way. They hold it, compress it, and release it gradually. This controlled emergence mirrors the ideas embedded within the work: care, containment, and the measured unveiling of presence.
As expressed in the exhibition, light here is not something that performs, it is something that is revealed through preparation and restraint.
Africans Column: Produced between Lagos and Marrakesh using processes like sand-cast brass and carved wood, the collection reflects multiple craft traditions. How do you approach material collaboration across geographies while maintaining a singular voice?
Salù Iwadi Studio: Each geography contributes a specific material intelligence. In Lagos, the brass is sand-cast, marked by heat, gesture, and irregularity. In Marrakesh, the wood is carved with precision, shaped through a lineage of controlled craftsmanship.
The coherence of the work does not come from uniformity, but from intention. It is the conceptual framework that binds these processes together, allowing different traditions to coexist within a single object. The result is not a fusion, but a dialogue.
Africans Column: In earlier works such as the Zangbeto Side Table and Water Basin Totem, there is a more outward, monumental presence. The Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ collection feels quieter and more introspective. Was this shift in scale and tone intentional?
Salù Iwadi Studio: Yes, it was a deliberate shift. Earlier works, such as the Zangbeto Side Table, engage with movement, presence, and a more outward expression of energy. With the Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ collection, the focus turned inward, toward stillness, containment, and interiority.
This shift allowed us to explore a different register of power, one that is not declared, but held. It aligns closely with the broader thinking of Ìmọ́lẹ̀, where presence is defined not by visibility, but by what is carefully concealed and revealed.
Africans Column: As this collection opens a more intimate and contemplative direction in your practice, what questions are you currently exploring, and how might they shape the future of Salù Iwadi Studio?
Salù Iwadi Studio: We are increasingly interested in how these ideas can extend beyond the object into spatial and experiential forms. Installations are one way we have started already to express this, but we are equally drawn to architectural projects that can embody a similar vision at a larger scale.
The question is no longer only how an object carries meaning, but how entire environments can hold and transmit it, how design can structure encounters, rituals, and collective experiences.
The upcoming exhibition in Benin marks an important step in this direction, with a space where objects, context, and audience come into alignment. From there, the work continues to expand, remaining rooted in cultural memory, while constantly finding new forms through which it can be lived.
At a time when contemporary design increasingly risks flattening culture into surface aesthetics, Salù Iwadi Studio offers something far more rigorous and deeply felt. The Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ Lamp Collection is not simply a lighting series, but an exploration of how objects can carry memory, spirituality, care, and ancestral knowledge into contemporary life. Through oak, brass, shadow, and carefully restrained illumination, Rufai and Nassila create works that ask viewers to slow down and reconsider what light, presence, and domestic space can mean within African cultural frameworks.
What ultimately distinguishes the collection is its refusal to separate philosophy from form. Every curve, material choice, shadow, and filtered glow emerges from a deeper engagement with Yoruba cosmology and feminine authority, allowing the objects to function simultaneously as sculpture, design, and cultural transmission. As Salù Iwadi Studio continues expanding into installations and architectural environments, the Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ Lamp Collection signals not only an important evolution within their practice, but also the growing maturity and global significance of contemporary African collectible design itself.
