Mortars are manual tools employed in various collective rituals of pre-Columbian societies. Their use varies from religious ceremonies to food and medicine preparation. Through them, we extract the essences that plants and minerals have created from their interaction with the sun, water and soil.

Nourishment, healing, and ritual are all contained within a single, three-concavity object. It is through the extraction of living substances, colored dyes, flavors, scents and remedies that our body – with a repetitive and rhythmic movement – relates to an ancient ritual.

We met Loyalsea in 2017. The project celebrates the diversity in surf through empowering stories and imagery for media and brand partners. The team works with an engaged community of creators and individuals such as surfers, photographers and nature lovers. For those creators, Loyalsea wanted a special gift that connects them with their favourite pastime – surf – and nature.

Surf has a particular tool for an almost ritualistic moment: the waxkit. This small gadjet must appear right at the transition from land to water. Putting on wax and preparing the board is an action that, for Loyalsea, deserves special treatment.  We believe that design can give a new sense to moments like this, it can reestablish the connection between self and nature, and enrich our experience of time. It was an interesting challenge to design a waxkit for their community.

We share with Loyalsea founder, Katharina Kieck, our love of the sea and the knowledge that through design we can have a positive relation with nature, avoiding the use of plastic. This is why the waxkit is made from hand-carved huayruro wood, a tree native to peruvian Amazon, and the accompanying comb has a braided hemp cord. The wax-box closing system has two small embedded magnets that can keep the lid tight when on the go, and can open easily by sliding sideways.

For the studio, this collaboration with Loyalsea was especially rewarding, and it is part of our ongoing exploration on our relation with water sources. Water is a fundamental element in our life.

We excavate the earth crust to find sediments and decipher the discontinuous process of stratigraphy. Each strata is like the fiber of a mineral tissue. The vegetables fossilize and settle in the form of mineral remains; the mineral is absorbed by plants and becomes nourishment for animals. One becomes the footprint of the other in a continuous tissue.

Knitting relates us to our surroundings.

Everywhere there exist different fibers, and particular techniques and uses have developed for each one of them. Natives have developed varied skills to work animal furs and plant-based fibers. Some know how to embroider, others weave on looms and create other basketry products. Fibers can grow in different places, but with changes to their toughness, density and color. Where junco grows, baskets are woven; tapestries are made where there is totora and hats were there is toquilla. Different fibers and techniques in each place.

Fibers follow organic shapes and take on the shape of the body they cover when knit. A basket is woven around a mold, just like the tree bark folds around the trunk, or geological layers surround and cover the earth. The tissue folds; it covers us and protects us. It is the surface that surrounds us.

In a loom, animal fibers, plant dyes and mineral pigments become a single tissue. The fibers and threads bend, dye and intertwine one over the other in a discontinuous or interlayered fashion, forming different patterns. Each pattern creates a unique texture in the surface. The artisans understand this process and mold the place’s memory with their hands. As makers, they are able to understand the transformation of the material they employ, which begins in the place where the fibers grow, all the way to the moment in which their hands compose them and give them the finishing touch.

To look into the place is to unravel its image. To peel its layers and the footprints of time to find the fibers and patterns that have formed. To unravel the image is to dismember it in touch-sensitive fibers. It is to penetrate into the skin of the visible surface and understand the manual and bodily processes through which it was formed. To relearn the artisans’ labor means reestablishing contact with these processes. It means understanding there is a footprint left by the body and nature behind that image.

It is located in the same building that houses Central Restaurante, in the traditional district of Barranco on the Limean coast. Like all the project’s spaces, Kjolle’s architectural concept emerges from the relationship between landscaping and architecture. Its identity, however, is far from being a mere extension of Central.

Kjolle’s architecture stems from a search for simplicity and fluidity, as this is a restaurant that nourishes off Peruvian biodiversity without adhering to the order of its ecosystems.

The use of soft colors and textures was essential to the project: while minerals are predominant in Central – volcanic rock for the floors, clay and Amazonian wood for its panels – warmth predominates in Kjolle – pine wood for the false ceiling, and the delicate cream tone of its Ayacuchan onyx bar.

Natural elements and unique, artisanally crafted pieces bring warmth to the space, thus a textile piece was created in collaboration with artist Ana Barboza and artisan Elvia Paucar. Moreover, the restaurant is illuminated by natural light that is filtered through a patio coated in volcanic rock and two inner gardens.