Marieta
Langeani
Dialogue First. Design Follows.
Work
Motion
About me
Let´s talk
Process:
Be.Coming (2024)
Self Dialogue.
Clay, Plaster, Glass.
Self Dialogue.
Clay, Plaster, Glass.
Be.Coming is a series of glass vessels developed in response to When God Was a Woman. While reading the book, I began questioning how deeply my socialisation had taught me to seek permission (from an external gaze) to experience pleasure, happiness, and simply exist.
Inspired by female anatomy, the series emerged from a desire to reclaim pleasure through making. It explores the more transcendental experience that can arise when we allow our bodies to feel happiness and pleasure without fear. Almost as something divine.
Working with glass became a transformative experience for me. It brought back a deep joy in making something with my own hands, while also confronting me with the frustration of a material that often behaves differently than expected. The process became an exercise in finding a balance between striving to make something perfect, learning through failure, and accepting things as they are.
The vessels were made by sculpting woman-inspired forms in clay and blowing glass over them. These forms were also used to create negative moulds in sand, into which glass was poured, producing a second family of shapes. In the end, the project became a recovery of a possible kind of happiness: never complete in the way we may naively wish for, but real nonetheless.
The vessels were brought to life in collaboration with Glassmanufaktur Harzkristall, with glassmaker Christian Schmidt translating the forms into glass.
Inspired by female anatomy, the series emerged from a desire to reclaim pleasure through making. It explores the more transcendental experience that can arise when we allow our bodies to feel happiness and pleasure without fear. Almost as something divine.
Working with glass became a transformative experience for me. It brought back a deep joy in making something with my own hands, while also confronting me with the frustration of a material that often behaves differently than expected. The process became an exercise in finding a balance between striving to make something perfect, learning through failure, and accepting things as they are.
The vessels were made by sculpting woman-inspired forms in clay and blowing glass over them. These forms were also used to create negative moulds in sand, into which glass was poured, producing a second family of shapes. In the end, the project became a recovery of a possible kind of happiness: never complete in the way we may naively wish for, but real nonetheless.
The vessels were brought to life in collaboration with Glassmanufaktur Harzkristall, with glassmaker Christian Schmidt translating the forms into glass.
Other Media
Process:
Woodworking (2017)
One-to-one dialogue.
Wood (Freijó).
One-to-one dialogue.
Wood (Freijó).
Morito Ebine was one of the most important mentors in my development. I took two foundational woodworking courses with him: one focused on hand tools and the other on a combination of hand and power tools.
The chair and stool presented here were designed by Morito and made by me during these courses. The chair was built entirely with hand tools, using joinery techniques rooted in Japanese woodworking traditions, while the stool combined manual and power-tool processes. A significant part of the training was dedicated to sharpening and tool maintenance, not simply as technical preparation, but as a way of developing autonomy, precision and responsibility throughout the making process.
Other than the technique, the experience profoundly changed the way I understood design. As I built each piece, I realised that I wanted to go beyond execution and understand how design decisions were made. At the same time, I learned that designing an object requires an understanding of the possibilities, limitations and consequences involved in making it.
One of Morito’s teachings has stayed with me in particular: some of the trees used in woodworking take 100 or even 150 years to grow. The least respect we can show the material is to make something capable of lasting just as long.
I only came to understand many of his teachings with time. Some of them, I feel, I am still understanding today.
Pina (2023)
Technical dialogue.
MDF.
Technical dialogue.
MDF.
The result is a plant stand inspired by the silhouette of a spider. By lifting plants off the ground, Pina creates playful sculptural compositions within a space. Its character changes with each plant: trailing foliage conceals the central body and leaves only the legs visible, while smaller plants emphasise its more dramatic spider-like silhouette.
Pina brings greenery into the home with a subtle sense of humour.
Process:
Neudi (2023)
Technical dialogue.
MDF.
Technical dialogue.
MDF.
Developed as the final project for a model-making course, Neudi was my first extensive experience with mould-making and casting. The process moved from sketches and material studies to polystyrene models and a carefully sculpted clay master. From this positive form, a negative mould was produced, followed by a new positive cast in polyurethane resin, with the bit holder embedded directly into the body. The piece was then sanded, refined and lacquered by hand.
The process introduced me to the relationship between positive and negative forms, as well as to technical considerations such as undercuts and mould release.
The project also marked an early cultural and personal shift in my education. Its organic, colourful form differed considerably from most of the work being developed around me, and presenting it meant trusting my own visual language and accepting the vulnerability of making something that stood apart.
Designed to sit comfortably in hands of different sizes, Neudi gives an everyday tool a playful and tactile character.
Process
Ki.Ki (2024)
Collective practice dialogue.
MDF.
Collective practice dialogue.
MDF.
Ki.Ki is a set of storage boxes based on the Jastrow illusion, in which two identical shapes appear to differ in size because of the way they are positioned. Although both boxes share the same dimensions, the arrangement of their curved edges leads the eye to perceive the upper one as smaller.
The task was to create a product exploring the theme of perception. Our chosen concept was optical illusion. Following the initial ideation phase, the making process began with a cardboard prototype. We then developed the design in Rhino, laser-cut it from MDF, and finished the pieces through sanding, assembly, and painting.
Ki.Ki marked my first experience of a group design process that felt both structured and genuinely collaborative. Everyone contributed to the theoretical foundation and the ideation phase. As the project developed, responsibilities were distributed democratically according to each person’s strengths, interests and the time available.
For the first time, I experienced design methodology as a process unfolding in practice. Research, ideation, prototyping, development and production followed one another with clarity, while each person remained responsible for the quality of their contribution. The result felt consequential because it emerged from a shared process in which everyone participated.
This is a collaborative group project with Schibo Bremers, Kaja Jersch, Valeriya Mykhaylychenko and Lilian Sanders.
Loop (ongoing)
Systemic dialogue
Recycled HDPE and PP
Where are we going? Is that where we want to go? And what, after all, is the role of a designer in shaping the future?
Loop emerged from a tangle of questions that began to arise as I was thinking about my graduation project. So far, it is my most personal and comprehensive project, because it was where the different forms of dialogue I had been developing throughout my education began to converge.
The process began with a personal motivation and contextual research. It then expanded into individual and collective conversations, participatory processes, technical experimentation and, finally, an increasingly systemic understanding of the relationships involved.
Gradually, those initial questions began to take on more defined contours. It also became clear to me that design alone would not be able to solve — or even fully explain — many of the problems I wanted to work with, among them waste management in Fernando de Noronha. At several points, the practice itself generated new questions for which I had no ready answers. There were hypotheses, attempts, mistakes and changes of direction.
It was precisely from this realization that I decided Loop should not end with my Bachelor. Beyond bringing together the work developed during my degree, Loop came to be conceived as an ongoing research and design project: a framework for exploring how design can operate systemically, connecting people, materials, techniques and territories.
Fernando de Noronha was the first context in which this approach took shape, but Loop was conceived as an open framework. It can continue to develop there or take on new forms in other territories, through new collaborations.
For a quick overview of the project so far, watch the video:
Territory Choice
Fernando de Noronha became the first territory of investigation for Loop for a reason.
When I began the project, I had already been returning to the island for more than eleven years. Over time, Noronha ceased to be simply a place I visited and came to represent, for me, a territory of connection, learning and responsibility.
I wanted to develop my graduation project in a place that held personal meaning and to work with an issue whose consequences extended beyond the scale of an individual object. Waste management in Fernando de Noronha offered precisely this point of convergence.
Following the principle that guides me, I first sought to understand the relationships that already existed there through dialogue, before proposing any design intervention.
When I began the project, I had already been returning to the island for more than eleven years. Over time, Noronha ceased to be simply a place I visited and came to represent, for me, a territory of connection, learning and responsibility.
I wanted to develop my graduation project in a place that held personal meaning and to work with an issue whose consequences extended beyond the scale of an individual object. Waste management in Fernando de Noronha offered precisely this point of convergence.
Following the principle that guides me, I first sought to understand the relationships that already existed there through dialogue, before proposing any design intervention.
Loop No. 1
Research and Definition
During the previous six months, as part of an academic mobility semester, I conducted contextual research in Fernando de Noronha. During this period, I followed everyday practices related to waste disposal, observed habits and routines, spoke with residents, entered their homes, conducted interviews and gathered information from both official sources and direct field observation. You can learn more about the mobility semester on this Video:
I sought to understand not only how waste circulated, but also how people, materials, infrastructure, tourism, domestic space, local initiatives and cultural practices related to one another within that territory.
The Bachelor Study, developed afterwards, served to organise, analyse and synthesise part of this material, transforming an extensive investigation into a clearer basis for the development of the following project.
You can learn more about this stage of the project by clicking here.
Loop No. 2
Workshops and Leia
Based on the questions identified in Loop No. 1, the development combined participatory methods, material experimentation and prototyping. During January 2026, workshops and conversations with residents were used to explore perceptions, habits and possibilities around waste separation through a speculative and participatory approach.
Workshop (2026).
The central question guiding this stage was:
How might design cultivate material literacy and shared ecological responsibility among the residents of Fernando de Noronha, supporting them in imagining and articulating future circular relations within the island’s ecological limits?
Practice revealed important differences between what had been planned and what actually worked in the real context, requiring adjustments in method and direction throughout the process.Workshop (2026). Ph: Mariano Correa. Workshop (2026). Local Media Coverage from the Workshop (TV Golfinho, 2026). Ph: Mariano Correa.
Leia emerged from this process as a modular waste-separation system designed to operate from the domestic scale to potential community applications. The proposal seeks to adapt to the island’s spatial constraints, make use of locally recovered materials and engage with existing objects, practices and infrastructure, such as the use of plastic galéias by residents. It was intentionally designed to be produced locally using the plastic waste already available on the island, particularly HDPE and PP, and with the machinery accessible there. In this way, the system not only supports waste separation, but also demonstrates that discarded material can become a local resource for making new objects.Leia functions as a first material intervention within a much larger system — a proposal that can be tested, modified and expanded in collaboration with other actors.
You can learn more about the development of Leia here.
Werkschau
The intention was to create a more immersive experience around a theme that emerges from a very specific territory, but manifests itself in different ways almost everywhere in the world, including Germany, where the exhibition took place.
To make the scale of the problem more tangible, Fernando de Noronha’s waste-treatment facility was recorded through LiDAR scanning using Polycam. This material served as the basis for a digital reconstruction of the space.
With specialised technical support, the elements obtained through the scan were processed and multiplied in Blender, creating a virtual path that simulated a walk through the waste handling and accumulation environment.
In the installation, Leia was physically presented in front of this digital landscape. The contrast between the existing waste system and the design proposal sought to place problem, context and possibilities for transformation side by side.
You can watch the installation video here:
Recognition
Awarded for the outstanding Bachelor thesis “Loop — A Circular and Speculative Approach to Product Design on Tourist Islands,” recognised for its particular originality.
Nomination — German Design Award, 2026 (ongoing)
Newcomer category
Next steps
Future iterations may continue in Fernando de Noronha, deepening the implementation and development of Leia, or emerge in other contexts and territories.
The intention is to continue exploring Loop as a way of thinking about and practising design systemically, through new partners and possibilities for development.
If you are interested in collaborating with Loop, please get in touch.