ili.ad presented Maceta Celosía in The Reality of the Virtual, the Curated section of COLLECTIBLE Brussels 2025. Held from March 13 to 16 at the Vanderborght Building, COLLECTIBLE’s eighth Brussels edition brought together 127 exhibitors from 36 countries, including galleries, independent designers, institutions, collectors, journalists, and design professionals. ili.ad was included in the fair’s Curated section, chaired by Brecht Wright Gander.
Curated around the statement The Reality of the Virtual, the section invited designers to explore the space between imagination and reality, where objects take shape through both digital processes and traditional craft. COLLECTIBLE’s press materials describe the Curated section as a platform for radical experimentation and discovery, with participants asked to consider how the boundaries between workshop practice and digital design are shifting in the age of VR, AR, and AI.
Maceta Celosía translates an architectural surface into a compact vessel form. The work grows out of ili.ad’s earlier studies of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s New York Times Building, whose glass facade is screened by ceramic rods that act as a parasol against direct sunlight. In Maceta Celosía, that logic of sunscreen, tube, rhythm, and facade is compressed and twisted into a more expressive object: part planter, part architectural fragment, part ornamental study.
Rendered as a barro negro prototype in Oaxaca, Mexico, the piece folds together several strands of the studio’s research: tubular facade systems, tropical Deco, Churrigueresque excess, and the visual atmosphere of Mexico City. Its dark ceramic surface gives the object a strange virtuality of its own, absorbing light while preserving the memory of a digitally modeled form.
The work found a natural context within Duyi Han’s scenography for the Curated section, which COLLECTIBLE describes as a hand-painted, AI-assisted floor piece that transformed the exhibition ground into a “virtual-physical terrain.” Against that setting, Maceta Celosía appeared as a small architectural translation: a facade loosened from the tower, reformed by hand, and returned as an intimate domestic object.
Object Details
Maceta Celosía
2025
Barro negro clay
Prototype produced in Oaxaca, Mexico