Rich Mnisi
Designer
Born in Johannesburg in 1991, Rich Mnisi’s broad design vision embraces fashion and functional sculpture. His work flows according to the themes and motifs he returns to and continually pushes forward: the women in his life, queerness and the VaTsonga tribe. When designing objects of furniture, Mnisi frees himself from received assumptions of their base features and functional characteristics. Rather than being led by ideas of how a chaise or console table should look, his approach is organic, beginning with moulding the pieces in clay and drawing from human figures or his own memory. His unconventional use of shape, colour and texture is rooted in his appreciation of his Tsonga culture filtered through a queer lens.
Exhibited at DESIGN MIAMI.LA 2024 Nwa-Mulamula’s Chaise marked fashion designer Rich Mnisi’s breakthrough into collectible furniture. Reworked in concrete for this collection, it is a powerful evocation of the transfer of knowledge between generations, here transmuted into a gesture of peace, reflected in its title, Rhulani (Peace). With its rounded, sensual forms and imposing physicality, this concrete piece is in homage to the memory of Rich’s late great-great-grand mother, whose teachings have lived on in his family generation after generation. Like his 2018 fashion collection of the same name, the chaise takes its title from this central matriarch – “Nwa-Mulamula” which means “guardian”. Rich has said: “She is a sacred, powerful and spiritual component of my being – although she rests as a guardian in an ancestral realm, her spirit, lessons and sacrifices have defied temporal limitations,” he has said. “I see her as symbol to pay homage to the role of African mothers whose stories are either seldom documented or given the light they deserve.”
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