Iany Gayo and Lucrezia Papillo may be expats—Gayo is from Mozambique, Papillo from Italy—but their work is in deep conversation with the handcrafting community in Portugal. “The first spark of inspiration for any project is either a material, technique, or place,” says Gayo. For their Bulrush collection, the pair linked up with a weaver, Manuel Ferreira. Gayo and Papillo went to the countryside with him regularly, helping him harvest the bulrush plant he would use for the Cadeira chair. The weaver fashioned strands of the dried plant into a shrimplike spiral for the backing, contrasting with the chair’s iron frame. It was a design the weaver was initially unsure about, as the unusual loose bulrush flair at the tip of the chair makes it more fragile. “Sometimes it’s good that we’re not the master ourselves because then we come with questions that push the artisans. It’s always a compromise,” says Papillo. The duo, known as m_a_c_h_e_i_a, is included in this year’s #Dwell24, our annual r...