Artist-Architect Maïté Seimetz shapes objects that are felt as encounters. She crafts both the way her objects look and the sensorial experience that surrounds them. At first glance, the objects she designs look as if they were once alive. Upon closer look, concentric layers of fibrous material reveal the digital origin of each piece, concealed with a meticulously executed layer of lacquer.
When handled, their shape, texture, and weight speak back to us, almost manifesting a kind of enchantment that feels both intimate and otherworldly. Her tools and furnishings seem to carry inherited memories or quiet narratives. They appear to exist somewhere between the designed and the dreamt. It is a suggestion that even the most practical object can hold mystery.
I first came into contact with Maïté’s work at an event in London curated by Gubns, a platform that showcases objects by architect-makers operating outside of traditional practice. Her objects stood out immediately, and I took a selfie in front of one of her mirrors hanging from the ceiling. I still remember how that reflective surface—tucked away in an oversized, convoluted frame—resembled a portal to another dimension.
Over a remote lunchtime conversation, Maïté and I spoke about the soul of functional objects, forms that feel alive, and craft not as nostalgia, but as discipline—one that, even when shaped by technology, must resist becoming mere style.
Interview by Juan Cantú | Edition by Candela de Bortoli | Photography by Maïté Seimetz
Your pieces seem to foster a deep connection, not just utility
Yes, I’m quite interested in how we can craft affective relationships between things in general, not just between humans. There is something to be said about the meaningful connection we can create with objects we use daily. I think it makes us take a bit more care for the things around us, especially given the rapid consumption of objects, such as fast fashion and super commodification. Because everything is so readily available, it is actually helpful to remind ourselves that things do not need to be instantly disposable. Compare it with how people in the past used to have fewer, long-lasting objects and pass them down through generations.
That’s interesting. I imagine, then, that it becomes important for
your objects to exist physically and be experienced.
Yes, precisely. I started working in a purely digital space, and I quickly felt that working in two dimensions was limiting. I enjoy the physical dimension of my objects. It’s not only how they look, but also how they can be touched or looked at. Depending on how the light bounces off an object, what time of the day it is, where you are, what side are you looking at it from, the object will always change a little bit.
There is also something about scale, but not scale as a representation, but as an opportunity to experience my work. In fact, the first sculptures that I made were incredibly intricate, but I realised that things needed to be produced at the correct scale for communicating the emotion I want to convey—you don’t have an infinite magnifying glass in real life.
And I think that, in the interaction with an object, the object gives back a kind of soul.
What do you mean by that?
It’s quite strange, but I do think that an object gets infused with the energy of those who interact with it. It’s a bit like when something is haunted. There is a strong binding element. That is also the kind of estrangement that I enjoy.
One of my grandmothers kept everything that she inherited, and she had a bit of a hard time getting rid of these objects because they became synonymous with who owned them before, so she held on to that memory and essence. She had a kind of hoarding attitude to passed-down items.
I have quite a strong nostalgia for anything that I've found in my grandparents' house. They are relics of another time. I personally get really attached to these kind of objects. So, in my work, I am trying to recreate that feeling of inheriting something that has had other lives before.
Texture seems to be an important part of your work.
Yes, it is about the sensorial experience of touching the pieces. When I 3D print, I try to avoid plastic filaments and use, for example, wood ones instead, which contain actual wood powder. I've also been printing objects that are much heavier than they would need to be, so that weight becomes part of the experience.
It’s funny. When you 3D print something, you usually optimise
it so it becomes lighter and cheaper to print, but here you are
doing quite the opposite. Where does your interest in the
weight of your objects come from?
I think it comes from a place of tradition—what you've made from noble, heavy materials, from stone or metals, things that feel heavy in your hand. There is this association between weight and worth that is very ingrained in our brains. But I wonder, is weight what actually gives the object its value, or is that association tricking us into thinking something heavy is more valuable than it is?
To me, weight is a variable that I can distort, another factor that can contribute to the experience of an object and produce an immediate visceral reaction. If you come across something that looks super heavy yet suddenly it's extremely light, that can also be disturbing. You can see the surprise in people’s faces as well.
Would you say that technology has a major role in your practice?
In digital fabrication, many times, technology becomes the subject of the work, which is not something I'm interested in. For me, it's always been a tool, a means to get somewhere. A lot of the time it creates this barrier between the emotional, human connection to the finished object.
In my practice, I try to invert that dynamic. I use technology to create objects that still carry emotional resonance. People don't really perceive my objects as machine-made, or at least that doesn't seem to be the concern.
In architecture, the term organic is often associated with
curvilinear forms or references to nature. But it can also
suggest something alive, even bodily. I feel your work
carries some of these qualities.
I understand what you mean, but I don’t think of ‘organic’ as biomimicry, in the sense of researching and creating systems around patterns and shapes that occur in nature. To me, it's more the psychological or emotional side of what it means to be alive and to be connected to other people.
A lot of my formal references are anthropomorphic, like muscles, bodies, and limbs. We are all influenced by our inevitable human filter anyway—we can recognise faces in anything, even non-human things. That's something I like to play with, and that a lot of my work relies on.
The word enchantment comes to mind. Like when
something seems alive, or moving around.
Well, yes. It's when you give it a humanoid or human-specific attribute. This is the phenomenon of the ‘uncanny valley’, which relates to the positive emotional response to things that are almost, but not quite, human. These objects feel weird and strange.
Because enchantment, I guess, is a kind of amazement or excitement. So, if we drew a spectrum of animation in objects, we would have ‘demonic possession’ on one extreme and ‘magical enchantment’ on the other.
When I think of memories and nostalgia, I think of narratives.
Do you create stories for the creatures that you make?
Often, they have intentions, like a task that they're performing, but that comes from the functionality, which is a sort of human-imposed mission. I like to imagine what would it be like if the object was actually expressing its own intentions. So, I make pieces that appear to be dysfunctional, where there might be something other than the function that we assign to it at first glimpse.
A lot of these shapes came from the surrealist movement, particularly Meret Oppenheim’s furry teacup, Magritte’s paintings, or Salvador Dali’s elongated bodies. I like these objects because they sort of connect unexpected things. So a lot of that has shaped, I think, the way I perceive creating, as an assembly of a bunch of things.
You can have the dreamlike quality, the subconscious and then there is a distilling of something that's not necessarily rational or purposeful, which can have multiple meanings, and it doesn't necessarily need to be explained. A lot of it is feeling-based.
