Arik Levy at Design Miami

Arik, I remember something we posted on dwell.com ages ago about you, which is that you dry pomegranates each year. And that they are some of your favorite objects.

Yes, that’s true. Eating a pomegranate is part of the Rosh Hashanah celebration and I always take a couple and dry them over the course of the year.

How are the new ones doing?

Really well, thanks. I dried them a couple months ago and they are turning out great. The reds are so rich.

Have you by chance seen that synagogue, the one over near Lincoln Road on Miami Beach that houses the Cuban Hebrew Congregation?

Yes. I love it. It’s wild. To me what is so impressive is not just the building. What’s beautiful is that we see that a culture and a religion has this amazing ability to adapt. It’s easy to think about a religion as a set of rules telling us how to act. But really it’s about people. So to see a church or a synagogue or a mosque, which has adapted to embrace local architects, local materials and local people, is very powerful. It’s also a really strange building. It reminded me of a church I saw at the Frank Lloyd Wright show at the Guggenheim earlier this year. Wright had a design for a church that was truly out of this world. So strange.

I wandered over to the HSBC VIP Lounge, which Greg Lynn designed to see your two new pieces installed there. Tell me about this HSBC collaboration you’ve got cooking.

Well, it’s a program called Connection Collection and to be honest, when I started out I was a kind of advisor to HSBC. You could say that I designed the program, but I had no intention of being a designer in it. I was surprised and happy when they asked me.

What you’re doing is creating the framework for HSBC to commission artists and designers to do work for them, that they will then exhibit all over the world in their offices.

Right. And I have to say it’s a really rare sort of program because the designer has a pretty free hand. HSBC does not interfere in the artistic process and you can really do whatever you want. The project I did, Rocksplit and Rockshelves is going to travel to Geneva after being here in Miami. These kinds of rocks I’ve done before, so for me the materials of these two projects was so important. I have two types of walnut wood I worked with: American walnut in the shelves and European walnut in the Rocksplit. Maybe most people won’t notice, but it was important to me to bring those two together. In my work I want a manifestation of what we have done to nature, but also a kind of reflection, or fragmentation of what nature can show us.

Are the two different types of walnut getting along?

There have been no fights so far. They both drink from the same bucket.

What do you make of Design Miami so far?

There are some things I like, but for me there are also some things which are out of place. I don’t like this exhibit of Mexican design [by the gallery Sebastian + Barquet] because I don’t think it’s a very good representation of what contemporary design is. It’s essential for a person who comes here who maybe doesn’t know much about design to understand what it is. The gallerists here, without taking on educational programming, have an educational role. So for me, this chair shaped like a butterfly from the 60s (right) is not a very good example. Certainly if you think that is what contemporary design is, then you won’t understand what I do.

Aside from the HSBC project, what have you got in the works?

I have a show opening up at a gallery in Paris called Slott. It’s called Foreplay, and my collection is called Confessions. It’s all about love, and all the silly problems modern couples have. So I created a contemporary domestic confessional where you can confess your sins to your partner, or a friend, or even no one. It’s good to wash all those things away. It’s like Yom Kippur, where you get to sin all year and then get rid of them all in one day. It’s a little crazy, but it’s also very efficient.

On that note, what do you most want for Chanukah?

That is actually a kind of amazing question. But I’m a father, man. I don’t get, I give. Funny you mention that though, because I’ve never done any design around Judaism or Jewish objects. But recently the Jewish community in Berlin asked me, as part of this program that promotes Israeli and Palestinian arts, to do some Jewish objects. So imagine, there they are, looking for Israelis and Palestinians to work in Berlin, and you have a totally tense political situation: Israelis and Palestinians together in the home of the Holocaust. What a crazy thing. But I’m excited to do it. I work in Paris though not Israel, and there is one Israeli guy who works for me, but we had to explain to the rest of our gentile team what a menorah is, what a shabbot plate is, what a Kaddish cup is. It was pretty funny. But the objects should all be out in September, and the German porcelain company Meissen is going to produce it. Being in that cultural and historical context was very powerful, which can be rare in such a mobile world. I mean, here we are at Design Miami which is a part of the wider Art Basel, which happens to be in Miami Beach. Where are we?