In Yoruba, the word for light is Ìmólè. A term that reaches well beyond illumination, encompassing hope, ancestral presence, the arrival of guidance, and the quiet dispersal of darkness. What it holds is both visible and intangible. Toluwalase Rufai and Sandia Nassila of Salù Iwadi Studio begin from this layered knowledge. They shape a collection in which light is treated as something inherited, held, and passed forward.
The Gèlèdé Lamp Collection is the pair's most concentrated statement yet and the most bodily. Where their earlier work moved through space (the Zangbeto Side Table's layered fins evoking ritual guardianship, the Water Basin Totem's monumental ecology), this work moves inward. Into the vessel and into the womb. When Wallpaper* named Rufai and Nassila Future Icons, and featured them in our January New Gen issue, we wrote about a practice grounded in the improvisational nature of African contemporary design, and design as a vessel for uniting past and future. The Gèlèdé Collection not only illustrates that idea but also inhabits it.
The Gèlèdé tradition is a public Yoruba ceremony of recognition, a formal, collective act of honouring the metaphysical authority that elder women hold over life, fertility, and communal continuity. Women are understood as the generative and regulatory centre of the world: custodians of Ìmólè, through whom hope and destiny are carried and introduced.
Rufai grew up within this framework. 'Over time, especially with the increasing westernisation of daily life, this understanding has become less visible and less commonly held,' she explains. 'For me, the work became a way of returning to that knowledge, not as nostalgia, but as a living framework.' Nassila, who comes from Madagascar and the Comoros, arrives at the same conviction through different geography: matrilineal systems in Madagascar, matrilocal authority in the Comoros. 'Celebrating the power of mothers is not an abstract concept to me,' she says. 'It is something lived.'
The point where their two histories converge, one Yoruba, one Malagasy and Comorian, is precisely where the studio operates most fluently: at the intersection of distinct African cosmologies that return, again and again, to the same centre of gravity. The female form and the maternal authority.
'For me, the work became a way of returning to that knowledge, not as nostalgia, but as a living framework'
Sandia Nassila
The three lamps, GLD01, GLD02, and GLD03, are composed of ovoid carved oak vessels that represent the womb, the calabash, and the orí: the Yoruba concept of the head as the seat of destiny. Each is pierced by sand-cast brass spirals that compress and filter light, releasing it outward with what the studio calls 'measured intensity.' The granular surface of the brass, embedded with the memory of earth, references the darkness of gestation and roots the objects in Ayé, the Yoruba realm through which life, ancestry, and cosmic force circulate.
The shapes are closed, weight-bearing, and deliberately opaque. 'The womb and the calabash are spaces that protect, regulate, and transform what they hold,' Rufai and Nassila explain. 'That thinking shaped the geometry directly. The light needed to feel interior, gradual, and discovered.'
GLD01 presents three vertically aligned vessels: ancestor, mother, and child. Temporal continuity made upright. GLD02 draws that lineage inward into a single vessel, dissolving generational distinction into continuous, interconnected presence. GLD03 brings the philosophy into intimate scale, closer to the body, yet retaining 'its full conceptual weight.' Together, they do not describe a progression, but reiterate a single philosophy through variation.
'The repetition is a way of deepening understanding rather than replicating it — making the work both layered and alive.'
Toluwalase Rufai & Sandia Nassila
The collection is handcrafted between Lagos and Marrakesh as an argument for what happens when distinct craft inheritances are asked to meet inside a single object. In Lagos, the brass is sand-cast: raw, heat-marked, carrying what the studio calls 'traces of the hand, of heat, of imperfection.' In Marrakesh, the wood is carved with a precision that centuries of tradition have made almost instinctive, controlled where the brass is restless, exact where it breathes. 'The act of casting and the act of carving,' the pair say, 'are inherited ways of making that carry knowledge within them.' The object that results belongs to both cities and neither, which is, perhaps, exactly the point.
'What matters to us is the meeting of these gestures,' the pair say. 'The act of casting and the act of carving, these are inherited ways of making that carry knowledge within them.' Working across territories within the continent is, for Salù Iwadi Studio, not logistics but ethos: an insistence that the richness of African design comes precisely from the broad and diverse range of craft knowledge that exists from one coast to another. The dialogue between those traditions is itself a creative act.
To call these objects' lamps' is technically accurate but somehow insufficient. Rufai and Nassila cite Louis Kahn when asked about the line between sculpture and design: 'A great building is not made of walls and ceilings; it is made of light and space, and the citation lands not as decoration but as precision. In this studio, shaping light is equivalent to shaping form.
'We began to see light as living matter,' the pair explain, 'something that could be held, guided, and shaped. In this context, it became a reflection of the life within a child and the power of mothers to nurture that life from the very first moments.' Each lamp holds light as a mother holds a child: containing it, shaping it, governing how it is experienced. Feminine authority governs not only how life is brought into the world, but how meaning, luminescence, and future are held and gradually released. The lamps become the argument.
For a studio that has always treated materials as storytellers, this denotes a clear inflexion. The Patewo Chair and Zangbeto Side Table declared a design language; the Water Basin Totem made it monumental. The Gèlèdé Collection turns it inward, into the intimate scale of the domestic object, the night-time object, the one that governs not how a room looks but how it feels to exist within one after dark.
Rufai and Nassila describe the collection as complete in itself but porous, a point on a longer continuum. 'The uncovering of our heritage is a continuous process,' they say. 'Future projects may take different forms beyond light, continuing to investigate the ways cultural memory and presence can be expressed through material and form.'
In a design landscape where provenance is frequently deployed as surface, culture as aesthetic, heritage as trend, Salù Iwadi Studio is doing something categorically different. They are not borrowing from tradition. They are in an active, accountable relationship with it: returning knowledge that has become less visible, giving it new material form, and placing it in the home as both an object and a quiet pedagogy. 'The work becomes both lived with and learned from,' the pair say, 'quietly operating as a reminder and an educational tool for how we once understood and structured life.'
Each light insists that design holds the capacity to preserve memory, embody meaning, and articulate identity. The light in these vessels does not just illuminate a room; it carries something forward. That is the difference between a lamp and a statement. Salù Iwadi Studio have made a statement.