Studio Swine looked to the abandoned town of Fordlandia, built in the depths of the Amazon by car magnate Henry Ford, to inspire a furniture collection that combines the town’s back story with a Brazilian mid-century aesthetic
The Amazon is known for its biodiversity, but one abandoned landmark in the region stands out, offering an intriguing look into the era of industrialisation and one man’s vision of the perfect lifestyle. American industrialist and carmaker Henry Ford founded Fordlandia in 1928 to secure a supply of rubber for Ford’s production line and to make his own version of Pleasantville a reality.
The project failed, but the intrigue surrounding it persists and has inspired a ground-breaking new furniture project by Studio Swine, which will be displayed in a solo show at Pearl Lam Gallery as part of Art Basel in Hong Kong next March.
Studio Swine is a joint venture between partners in work and life—Alexander Groves from the UK and Azusa Murakami from Japan—and aims to “straddle the spheres of sculpture, installations and cinema.” Today Groves and Murakami live in New York but in 2013 they were working out of São Paulo and determined to create a body of work that reflected their admiration for mid-century Brazilian furniture.
“We love the Brazilian tropicalism movement,” says Groves, on the phone from Brooklyn. “And we knew we wanted to create a collection infused with tropical modernist influences, but back when they were making their most famous pieces, they were using these amazing Brazilian hardwoods. Of course, it wouldn’t be right to use those woods now, as they’re highly endangered, so we needed to find something else.”
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At a São Paulo drinks party in 2013, they heard about an abandoned Amazon town that had once been the setting for a utopian American community and decided they had to visit it. A few weeks later, deep in the Brazilian rainforest on the banks of the Tapajós River, they discovered Fordlandia, a place preserved in time.