fernando laposse is shaping the future of craft
Across Fernando Laposse’s work, the future of design begins in a field, where a plant is grown for more than its commodity value and a material carries the memory of the place and people that made it.
Speaking with designboom, the Mexican designer traces his practice through corn husks, agave fibers, eroded hillsides, and the village of Tonahuixtla, where making becomes a way to build an economy around what the land can sustain.
His objects move through galleries and public installations, but their logic starts elsewhere, with seeds, farming seasons, soil, and relationships that have been maintained over years.
‘Craft is different, and it is applied very differently in practice for very different reasons around the world,’ Laposse tells designboom. ‘In the West, or in Europe and the developed world, this return to craft is almost anthropological. It can even feel like a wellness thing.’ In his region, he says, the word carries another weight.
‘In Latin America, which is what I know best, craft is still attached to a concept of poverty.’ This is the tension that runs through his work. He is drawn to hand-making, but he refuses to romanticize the conditions around it.
Fernando Laposse, 2025. image © Angie Smith, Angie Ro via instagram
fernando laposse looks beyond craft as style
The works of designer Fernando Laposse often begin with humble plant matter. Totomoxtle uses the husks of heirloom corn, which are peeled from the cob, flattened, and laminated onto paper or textile backing to create a veneer-like surface.
The natural tones range from deep purples to creams, browns, and pale golds, with each sheet carrying the color of the native corn variety that produced it. The material is cut and assembled like marquetry, forming furniture and wall surfaces that keep the grain and irregularity of the husk visible.
Yet the material is only one part of the story. Laposse explains that a major part of his practice has been changing the perception of craft in Mexico, both for makers and for clients.
‘Part of what I try to do with my work is redefine what craft means in Mexico, elevate the results of what we can do here, and change the preconception that craft has to be something you do for survival, or that, on the client’s side, it has to be something very cheap.’
The aim is cultural as much as material. Craft becomes a way to shift value back toward rural labor and agricultural knowledge.
research trip, Totomoxtle, 2026, Fernando Laposse with @we_are_dots. image courtesy the artist via instagram
agriculture as the site of innovation
While many designers turn toward existing techniques, Fernando Laposse says he set himself a different challenge. ‘I set myself a personal challenge as a designer not to use existing crafts,’ the artist says.
For him, the issue is tied to class, inequality, and access to the market. A designer can enter a community, adapt a traditional object, and make it desirable to a new audience, but that structure can leave the same imbalance in place. ‘The majority of those approaches still rely on the privilege of the designer, or the access to market that the designer has and the artisans do not.’
His answer has been to develop new craft systems around agriculture. ‘I would rather focus on design and craft empowering something else. In my case, that something else is agriculture,’ he continues.
With Totomoxtle, that means preserving heritage corn varieties that were pushed out by industrial farming and low grain prices. ‘What I do with corn, as far as I am aware, no one else does in the world. It is a craft that is very particular to my practice and now to the community I work with.’
Corn Kumiko, 2023, Fernando Laposse. image courtesy the artist
Totomoxtle builds a micro-economy from corn
In Tonahuixtla, Totomoxtle turns the corn husk into an alternative source of income, while giving farmers a reason to reintroduce native seeds. The project moves away from the grain as the only economic value of corn. Instead, the husk becomes a design material, and the field becomes part of a wider production system.
Over time, that system has grown around training, seed selection, land preparation, and financial support before the harvest arrives.
‘Over the last ten years, because it has officially been ten years this year, we have been building a whole ecosystem where design and craft are at the center,’ Laposse says. ‘They are the motor of everything, but they move all these other cogs and wheels. They focus on ecology, biodiversity, and soil regeneration.’
His language is mechanical, but the process is slow and agricultural. A piece of furniture may be the part seen in a gallery, while the work begins months earlier with planting and support for the families who grow the crop.
Furry Mirror, 2023, Fernando Laposse. image courtesy the artist
the gallery carries a human scale
Laposse is aware that once the work leaves the village, much of that complexity can disappear into a polished surface. To resist that flattening, he has documented Totomoxtle from the beginning, often arriving with a camera and bringing video into exhibitions and talks.
‘With this project in particular, I have tried to create a lot of transparency, so the final viewer can see the whole process,’ he says. ‘They can see not only the result, but also the challenges that existed before we started looking for solutions.’
For him, the story needs a human scale. ‘I think we have become quite insensitive to very large, depressing statistics,’ he continues. ‘If you read the number of trees deforested, or the square miles lost to erosion, or the millions of people who have migrated, it becomes an abstraction.’
The work gains force when those forces are brought back to one family or one group of families. ‘Once you start putting faces and personal stories to these issues, I think the viewer tends to feel more empathy.’
farmer from the community of Tonahuixtla. image courtesy the artist
agave fibers keep the plant alive
The agave work expands this thinking through another plant and another landscape process. In the same community, Laposse has worked with agave as part of a wider reforestation strategy, planting it across eroded slopes where its roots help retain water and soil. Instead of harvesting the whole plant for tequila, mezcal, or syrup, the fiber is taken by pruning the leaves.
‘The fibers are a very good solution because you prune the plant, but you do not kill it,’ he goes on. ‘That actually helps it grow healthier and faster, and produce more leaves.’
Those fibers become shaggy benches, tactile wall pieces, sculptural dogs, and fur-like armchairs, with strands that are combed and knotted by hand. In works such as Hair of the Dog, Furry Mirror, and Pink Furry Armchair, the material keeps its raw, unruly character, somewhere between plant fiber and animal coat, while still pointing back to the fields where it was grown.
Laposse also developed The Good Shepherd with Kvadrat, a rocking bench covered in knotted sisal from agave plants cultivated as part of his ongoing land and community regeneration work in rural Mexico. The piece uses mechanical fastenings and avoids glue so its parts can be reused or recycled, extending the same thinking from the hillside to the object’s construction.