ex soup is a Designhead
The Mexico City designer creates collage-driven furniture that awakens the imagination
ex soup is one of the featured designers in the new Designheads DIY book, now available on Metalabel. Designheads DIY is a "Furniture Recipe Book", containing instructions for making shelves, chairs, lamps and other objects from some of the world’s best designers. Created by Juliyen Davis and designed by Ally Zhu.
ex soup, or Javier to those that know him, might be called a designer in logical sense, in that he creates works that are perceived as design. But to those closer to his process, or even the works themselves, his pieces appear as equal parts collage, sculpture, and magical order-from-chaos. Seemingly disparate ingredients come together to form elegant seats, tables, lamps, or shelves, constructed from leftover wood, fabric cuttings, plastic crates, scrap metal, and more.
Through the incorporation of these materials, ex soup creates a design philosophy far more elegant than “upcycling”, embracing a kind of urban wabi sabi approach that highlights the subtleties and textures of scrap materials.
We’re excited to be featuring a selection of work by ex soup from 2-6pm this Sunday, January 26th, at RRETIEMBLE in Mexico City. We will have select copies of DIY for sale, as well as some limited-edition merch.
Age: 32
Location: Mexico
Sign: Capricorn
IG: @ex__soup
Website: exsoup.net
Are you a designhead + what does that mean to you? I consider myself more as a maker/builder than a designer. I believe that contemporary culture has pushed design to be primarily in the mental realm; focusing on planing, organizing, drawing, managing, etc. In ex soup I have a drive to use my body. It is within touching, lifting, folding, rolling, twisting, tearing, splitting, tying, bending, collecting, rotating, or repairing that I find the inspiration to do the work. First I do (act) and then think about it, inverting the design process to prioritize the body over the mind. Using the body as a way to detach from the conventional design methods and open space for chance, improvisation and sensation. None of the work I’ve done in ex soup has been drawn.
The last thing you made: I just built a little coffee table. It is built with part of a car engine and some scraps off metal I found in the dumpster.
The next thing you want to make: I will keep building more of these coffee tables with different types of engines.
A design object you love: I like genetic objects, and by that I mean really generic, like plastic buckets, plastic crates, traffic barricades, scaffolding, rubber tires, engines, decorative concrete blocks, etc. What I like about these objects is the fact that they somehow have slipped below the threshold of what would otherwise mark their identity as designed artifacts, within them there is no authorial display and for the most part, they lack geographically specific markers.
A design object you can’t stand the sight of: Loud motorcycles.
A moment of pure creative joy: Walking around the city, going to the tianguis.
What does it mean to “design the future”? For me it means changing pace. It means to explore the possibilities of traditional knowledges and low tech, to urge for practices of care, repair and maintenance, to promote the empowerment of the commons and community based economies and to use post extractive and post development technologies.
Words to live by: Practicas contaminadas y no deterministas, continuas e inacabadas, del vivir entre ruinas.
Your aesthetic approach embodied as a ...
song: La Soledad de Gloria by Bernardo Bonezzi
color: I like that moment when light gray becomes green
texture: I like cold smooth surfaces
natural material: Bambu
synthetic material: rubber
scent: rosemary
If you could show your work to anyone in the world, it would be: My grandmother
What’s next for you? I see myself creating more commission based work and hopefully being part of more exhibitions. I also have plans to scale up the work to more architectonic infrastructures such as kitchens, dry toilettes, bathroom sink cabinets etc.