Young Israeli designer Erez Nevi Pana (b. 1983) came up with a “vegan design” and made it trendy. In his understanding, “vegan design” almost equates to “ethical design.” We understand what vegan design is and why a salt stool is good:
“The decisions we make now have the power to affect the future of the world and the lives of future generations, and they also have the power to change the lives of animals and help us relinquish our aggressive domination of nature. Therefore, it is necessary to promote “vegan” design as much as possible – it means cooperation with nature, no damage in the process of manufacturing things.”
Vegan design for Nevi Pan, who has long preached veganism as a way of life, means, for example, the ability to weave a beautiful silk carpet without harming the mulberry tree worms. Processing of cocoons begins after the metamorphosis of the pupa and after it leaves the cocoon, while in traditional silk production, the worms die during the boiling of cocoons.
Nevi Pana unravels the cocoons and combines them with straw baskets taken from traditional silk production. Nevi Pana inherited his interest in weaving from his ancestors, who lived in the Indian village of NabiPanah (the designer’s surname comes from the name of this place) and made fiber for carpets.
He grew up in a family that owned a plant nursery. All his childhood he was surrounded by fertile land and plants; Probably, this and an in-depth study of biology at school served as an impetus for his experiments in creating materials from the earth and other components, some of his objects literally “grow”.
One of his early designs, Soilid, looked like a modest unfinished stool. The main thing in it was not the form, but the material from which it was made: the earth was mixed with mushrooms and baked, resulting in a fairly durable material that was processed on ordinary carpentry machines and assembled into a piece of furniture.
Nevi Pana is a true explorer. “In a sense, the whole planet has become one city for me; physically and virtually I wander endlessly in search of substances and try to cross them.” Salt, earth, asphalt, vegetable fibres, mushrooms, rubbish… He turns cashew shells into a black icing that he covers many of his objects with.
“My approach is both experimental and conceptual. I love that the search for solutions happens spontaneously. It doesn’t matter to me at all whether I see a clear function for the material or object at the initial stage of the project. The process itself and its energy are important to me. I would compare myself to a salmon swimming against the current – extreme sports are important to me.
Maybe I chose the design precisely because in art I could not achieve such an effect. The designer now should be including a thinker, point out the ways of development. Designers with professional education and self-taught designers are now in almost the same position: everyone is equalized by technology, and professionals have lost their “exclusivity” that they had until recently.
The designer’s studio is located in Tel Aviv. Eretz was educated first at the Holon Institute of Technology and later at the Einhoven Design Academy. There he studied in detail the processes of salt crystallization, and this project made him famous: the Salt collection became his brilliant thesis. It took more than five years to study the processes of crystallization of sea salt (the designer’s test site was the Dead Sea). The designer dipped wooden stools into the sea and waited for them, like corals, to be covered with a thick layer of sea salt. Next, Nevi Pana gave them an architectural form, emphasizing in each object the convergence of the organic and the ornamented.
In 2014, the designer was thinking about a concept called Recristallized Hotel, also based on the use of salt blocks and tiles in the interior. The fact is that every year in one of the areas of the Dead Sea about 20 million tons of salt settle to the bottom. This salt is leftover from the Dead Sea Works factory. As a result, not far from the production, literally deposits were formed, stratifications of salt, from which the water level in the production area began to rise. And under the threat of flooding or partial destruction, almost all hotels nearby have recently turned out to be.
Nevi Pana proposed a designer way to help dispose of excess salt. It’s productive, beautiful, and really helps clean up the seabed. Salt blocks and tiles pressed with solar energy can be used like marble flooring or wall tiles.
“I really liked the idea of Markus Kaiser, who melted sand using solar energy, and I transferred this method to sea salt. I knew for a fact that the energy to melt salt had to be cheap, so the sun was the best choice. Now salt blocks are a kind of marble for the poor. No one before me used this technology, so I patented it. We are in talks with several companies about the development of salt block construction.”
His exhibition “Vegan Design: The Art of Simplification” during the 2018 Furniture Design Week made a splash. Recently, the Holon Design Museum included two more Nevi Pan items in its exposition: they are made from organic materials, earth and mushrooms – this is in addition to the salt stools already available.
Nevi Pana now travels around the world giving lectures promoting vegan design ideas, and also curates exhibitions – recently there was an exhibition of ten designers dedicated to the ideas of veganism in the industry. He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Art and Design in Linz (Austria): his topic was the study of basic materials for design and new possibilities for the materialization of objects.
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