NEW EDITION

When I walked into Unique Design X’s (UDX) ground floor exhibition at the Expo Reforma convention center in February, the first thing I noticed were two groups of people clustered around two objects you don’t normally find at a design fair: a ping pong table and a jukebox. Sure, there were the types of sleek lamps and well-constructed wooden chairs that you can find at any other design fair, but these two outliers best capture the corner that UDX has carved for itself within Mexico City Art Week: the design fair offers a bit of levity within an already packed week of openings, fairs, and performances.

Started at Shanghai Art Week in 2019 and founded by Morgan Morris Sans, the nomadic fair has moved between Paris, the United States, and Mexico City, its home for the past three years. The fair’s mission is, loosely, to create a middle ground between collectible design, functional art, and fashion — and to build real, lasting relationships between artists and the cities where they show. This year, Morris Sans wanted to push that second part further. “Most fairs around the world, you parachute in, stay for a week, and then you go — it’s very ephemeral, there are no lasting relationships, no lasting traces,” she told me. Mexico City, she said, is where she feels those relationships can actually take root. So this year, UDX began brokering longer-term residencies and institutional exchanges — with France, Belgium, and Sweden — so that artists aren’t just showing work but living and making it here. One of the highlights was a case-in-point for this kind of relationship-building: Belgian designer Lionel Jadot of Zaventem Atelier came to Mexico City a month before the fair and made everything he showed — tall, spindly chairs with the attenuated proportions of Mackintosh, a lamp of coiled metal crowned with a salvaged wood box that looked like it had washed in on the tide — from materials he found on the street.

The fair’s manifesto, CECI N’EST PAS DU DESIGN (“THIS IS NOT DESIGN”), is an homage to Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, an invitation to look past the literal and consider how symbols and representations shape our reality. Indeed, at UDX, a ping pong table isn’t a ping pong table, and a jukebox isn’t a jukebox. The former — James de Wulf’s Resonating Ping Pong Table, Song No. 1 — is an assemblage of aluminum plates tuned to an A minor pentatonic scale, so that wherever the ball lands, it rings, creating an unpredictable melody through gameplay. Le Jukebox, a collaboration between Paris-based music archive Radiooooo and a Franco-Mexican woodworking team, is the physical translation of a streaming project that’s been running since 2013: pick any country and decade, toggle between slow, fast, or weird, and receive what the founders consider the most beautiful music from that time and place (slow and weird from Colombia in 1910 gets you “Amor” by Emilio Murillo, for example) The jukebox — a limited edition of ten — combines a wooden body nodding to the retro jukeboxes it descends from with colorful buttons below a touchscreen world map that shifts to your liking.

Morris Sans walked me around the rest of the exhibit, tepache in hand, pointing out highlights: a floor-length mirror by Mexico City studio Toro Manifesto, bisected by the type of lacy curtain that frames the doors of old bars and late-night restaurants in the city, as co-founder Regina Merino told me. Alongside the mirror sits a barstool whose seat spills into a ruffled skirt of upholstery — a decidedly feminine counterpoint to the collection’s tougher pieces, like a metal table whose controlled oxidation leaves it patterned in patches of rust, like a cowhide. Then there were the architects-as-designers: Occidente Galería, Guadalajara’s first design gallery, brought together furniture by some of the country’s most significant architectural figures, including Tatiana Bilbao and artist Jose Dávila, who originally trained as an architect. On display were simple chairs, benches, and shelving units with a subtle Modernist sensibility, rendered in local walnut, cedar, and eucalyptus, alongside a seat by the gallery’s co-founder Jorge Alberto Muñoz — a single slab of volcanic stone, cool to the touch, which you were invited to sit on.

There were also, inevitably, the more woo-woo corners of the fair: an installation of deconstructed hexagons by Antologia Design and Swiss-born artist Katja Loher, whose video performances were keyed to earth, wind, fire, and water; a collection of “cosmic relics” — totemic sculptures made from Mexican rocks by Jose Miguel Shnaider of Sten Studio, in a section curated by Gaïa Matisse, described as spiritual protectors and cosmic guides; and a hand-carved white sofa made from ceramic and epoxy resin by Roham Shamekh, which he said was inspired by the root chakra, though it looked more like something excavated from another planet entirely. I asked Morris Sans if that kind of work was something she actively sought out. It wasn’t, exactly. “I think maybe there’s something personal in there,” she said, attributing it to her nomadic life spent moving between Scotland, the American South, London, and France. “Life is art. Living your life is, in a way, art.” And though the fair made room for the devotional, she said that wasn’t her guiding force with UDX. “First, friendship and exchange — that’s what I look for.”