roki Design Interior · Bochum, Germany
Made to be taken apart
roki Design is a Bochum studio that prints candleholders and clocks in modular parts, in a plant-based plastic. Ronja and Kinan run the printers themselves and start a piece only once someone has ordered it.
Most things for a shelf arrive finished. A roki piece arrives as a kit of parts.
How a holder goes together
The ANIS candleholder is a set of printed elements that push together and are filled with sand so they stand. Six shapes and about thirty colours can be mixed freely, and the combination that gets printed is the one somebody ordered.
Named after painters
The ANIS variants carry the names of painters and take up their colours: MARKO after Mark Rothko, ETELA after Etel Adnan, AMARA after Tarsila do Amaral. Green, pink and violet sit next to each other in blocks, the way they do in the paintings they come from.
PLA, not injection moulding
The printing is done in PLA, a plastic made on a plant base, rather than by injection moulding. For the candle itself there is a heat-resistant aluminium cup that fits the holders. The sand can be tipped out again when a part has done its time, and a part that breaks or stops earning its place goes back through the studio's Second Life programme rather than into a bin.
The same logic, as a clock
LEIF is a table clock built from the same pushed-together parts, in colours the owner picks. A limited edition called Time to Shine was made with the Cute Community Initiative in Bochum.
Nothing on the shelf stays in the same combination for long.
