A conversation with Sabine Marcelis for ApartamentoTV’s Apartamento Taxi!

That’s a very good question. I think you need to be near your deathbed.

That’s also a good question! I feel too young—I just turned 40. But maybe there are retrospectives for different chapters or periods? Inez and Vinoodh are having a 40 year retrospective, but they also don’t want to call it a retrospective. There’s something very definitive about a retrospective, like it’s saying, ‘You’re done’. 

I don’t like to self-analyse. Things work, things are fun, and I’m enjoying myself—there’s no need to analyse it. I’m always in the same period, as in I’m always discovering new things, getting curious, asking ‘What’s next?’ I’m trying to be ‘there’ instead of ‘here looking over there’. 

Yeah! 

I’m presenting something this week that I’m super proud of. It’s a project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and I had the opportunity to do it for this Salone. I call it a fountain, but actually it’s not a fountain. It’s like a liquid sculpture. I really wanted to fine-tune the movement of a bubble of air through a liquid—kind of like a reverse lava lamp. We spent a bunch of time perfecting that, and the whole time I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is really expensive’, but I’m super proud of the result. This is why I’m a designer—for those moments when something that is really, really hard actually works and comes together. You and everyone that’s been a part of it have this ‘yes’ moment. It makes me feel alive.

I really want to try and appreciate the results of projects more. I have an amazing team of designers that work with me. We’re seven in the studio at the moment: myself, four designers, and two administrative colleagues. We have so many projects on the go all the time, and we’re always working on them, going through the motions, fine-tuning the production. But last weekend, for example, we all went to Coachella where we did an installation. While you’re working on it, you forget the context, but when you see the result of the project, it’s like, ‘This is actually kind of a big deal’. You feel this pride, and it’s a team effort. That’s what I’m addicted to—those moments where it was either really hard and you did it or you forget what you were really working on until it gets presented and you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, this is pretty cool’.

The Coachella project took the curator, my team, and the production, local coordination, and shipment teams. There’s so many cogs in the machine to make things happen.

I’ve really drawn to site-specific work—having some epic landscape to respond to and working with the sun and natural light. It would be really cool to do something in a body of water and work with that. 

Could be. Just something natural to respond to. For example, I had the opportunity a few years ago to make anything I wanted in front of the pyramids in Egypt. I made a sundial that responded to the sun and also had hidden solar cells inside it. It was charging itself during the day and then lighting itself up at night—that’s responding to the surroundings because it’s just naked and open to the sun all day. I’d like to work in a different location that is exposed to a different element. Maybe it’s a super windy or rainy location, or maybe I could work with the flatness of a lake—something that can be the trigger for an interesting interaction.

The project I’m showing here is an example of that. It’s for no one. I hope someone buys it one day, but I certainly didn’t have anyone or any scenario in mind designing it. It’s uncompromising, autonomous. I just wanted it to exist. We’ll see what happens to it.

I like both. I like to work in completely diverse ways—from an IKEA lamp to a one-off installation in a desert and everything in between. I think they all feed into each other, and some of them shouldn’t exist forever and others should definitely last a very long time. So I like all of it, within the right context. 

I just don’t know what else I would be doing. For me it’s a perfect combination of what really interests me. I’m a super nerd—I love figuring out how things work. My dad’s an engineer, and I think he instilled that in me. I find it really interesting to go into a factory and see what’s going on—that’s my interest. But I’m also fascinated by natural phenomena and beauty, how the sun bounces off my sunglasses. How do you combine those two? In a three-dimensional expression.

It’s all the same. I don’t have days off. It’s even to a point—and I really like this—where quite often there’ll be a problem or something that I haven’t been able to solve during the day, or even during a period of time, and then somehow I’ll dream about it and solve it in my sleep. I’ll wake up and I’ll know what to do. It actually happened a few weeks ago. In my dream I was already in Milan, with the light box that’s behind my work. The frame was silver instead of white, and I was like, ‘Shit, it’s the wrong colour!’ I woke up and emailed the production guys, ‘Just double-checking that the frame is white?’ They said, ‘You emailed us just in time. It was gonna be silver, but we can still change it to white’.