BRANCHING OUT

How the self-taught design duo behind Caribbean-based studio Ibiyane have carved out a unique approach to furniture making

-  MAZZI ODU

Origin stories hold a lot of clues to a designer’s beliefs and consequent trajectory, and Ibiyane’s is no different. ‘We started in 2020, during lockdown,’ explains Tania Doumbe Fines, who co-founded the studio with Élodie Dérond. ‘I basically had a notebook with things I wanted to do in my life, a bucket list I guess. And with my background in interior design, I wanted to make a chair. So I started designing an African birthing chair, and from that a friend of ours invited us to make a seat for an exhibition. Élodie started helping me and we just love the process of working together and bringing our ideas from our minds into actual objects crafted with our hands.’

While others across the globe allowed the pandemic and its attendant season of uncertainty to lead them to stasis, for Doumbe Fines and Dérond, it sharpened focus and galvanised a spirit of co-creation, at first in Montreal, and now in Martinique, near Dérond’s childhood home. Ibiyane was, and indeed still is, a studio that seeks to explore the stories we tell with the objects we make, and to incite deeper discourses between maker and collector.