A conversation with Dozie Kanu for ApartamentoTV’s Apartamento Taxi!

It was to celebrate the launch of my first mass-produced product with Knoll, which is a legacy brand. It was really overwhelming because I didn’t feel like I deserved it—it’s a weird impostor syndrome that I have. 

I first got introduced to the idea that I could even be doing it in 2023. In 2024, I sent them the prototypes from my studio. 

Jonathan Olivares is the sensei, and he’s the Phil Jackson to my Michael Jordan. He coached me up.

I’m super happy with how it turned out. I felt a bit of reluctance in the beginning because I made a firm stance around 2020 that I wanted my work to exist in the context of art. Before that I was in the collectible design conversation, so I had to make a hard pivot, which took several years. I think by 2024, 2025, I was fully firmly planted where I wanted to be, and then this opportunity came up.

That’s a good question. Sometime last year, September or August, we had the final design prototype viewing here in Milan at the Knoll factory. I just remember being blown away by the precision—the contrast between me making stuff in my studio and them making the luxury version. I thought, ‘Whoa, OK, this is what my work looks like on steroids’. 

What it made me realise is that everything I make has an upgraded version—a final level where all the t’s are crossed.

No. I think there’s a lot of enchantment and an endearing quality to something that feels raw and unfinished. I like things that aren’t tied up so neatly in a bow. But when you’re working with a company like Knoll, you understand that their client base wants the best of the best, so to see it tied up with a bow that well was like, ‘Woah, OK!’

Yeah, it was a shock. 

Yes, exactly! 

That’s the feeling. Also, my birthday is next Sunday. The party was supposed to be next Sunday, but they moved it to yesterday, and they had already ordered the cake. 

Yeah. Everybody kept saying ‘Happy Birthday’, and I had to keep saying, ‘It’s not my birthday’—but it was fun. As you can see, I kind of lost my voice. 

Yes, and I got one of my favourite DJs, Black Noi$e, to play, which was a real honour. He’s from Detroit, and he’s an amazing producer. He produces some of the illest beats for the new, underground, experimental rap landscape. It felt like…it still kind of feels like I snuck through the back door of this corporate company, and I’m getting to be myself within it.

I definitely struggle with it. When I get around people, I feed off of their energy, and it masks the feeling until people go away, and then I’m back with my own thoughts—then it gets heavy again. I can have fun in the moment, and then when I have to go back and reflect it’s like, ‘Oh shit’. 

In Houston at my mom’s house—I feel very safe. 

My mom’s there. I know that I don’t have to do anything. The problem with my current living situation is that I renovated this warehouse outside of Lisbon, Portugal, and half of it is my workshop where I make everything. I converted the other half into a living place—built out a kitchen, built out a lofted bedroom. But to enter the house, I have to walk through my studio, and so I can never really escape my work. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and just turn on the lights in my studio and look at stuff—it’s not healthy at this point. Maybe at a certain point it was really great because it helped me develop my language.

I’m looking for somewhere else to live and commute to my studio now.

Probably still in Portugal, yeah.

Since 2019.

I did not expect to end up there. I think back to my decision to move there, I think back to the person I was when I made that decision—and I was just a very impulsive person. I was about to sign a lease on a very big space in Greenpoint, and I could foresee the hamster wheel that space would have put me in. I would definitely have a very different artistic practice right now had I signed that lease because I would have had to be making work for the market—work that I know would sell. In an act of rebellion, I went on this world tour because I had never been outside of the United States, so I wanted to see the world—I went to like eight countries. 

Yes, the last stop on that trip was Portugal, actually around this time of year—perfect weather, went to the beaches. I was hosted by a wealthy marble manufacturer, so I stayed in his poolhouse. It was in the countryside, so I got accustomed to what countryside life was like. On a whim I started looking at what industrial spaces would cost in rent. I found one that was dirt cheap compared to what I was about to sign in New York, and I started taking the steps to get it, kind of blindly. Then I had it, and I was like, ‘OK, I got this’.

It’s an hour outside of Lisbon, and it takes me 25 minutes to drive to the grocery store. 

I personally don’t think that I’d be doing what I love, at all. I would have been a complete victim of late capitalism. I’m not saying that I’ve completely evaded that, but it’s a little bit less aggressive. Portugal is easy, you know—an easy lifestyle.