Each collection is built around a single collaboration: one region, one workshop, one tradition, developed over sustained time working directly alongside the artisans who hold it. Revenue and authorship are shared from the start. New relationships are established in partnership with cultural institutions and government bodies across México, conducted within the frameworks that protect artisan heritage and intellectual property. The studio works through these structures, not around them.
The first ceramic collection draws on Barro Vidriado, a glazed clay technique whose richly worked surfaces carry centuries of accumulated refinement. Studio Binat designed an entirely new family of forms for the collection, recomposing the motifs and shapes native to the tradition into objects made for a New York context. The technique is unchanged. The forms are new. Neither would exist without the other.
Named for Leonora Carrington, the surrealist painter born in England who made México her home and her subject, the collection reflects the studio's broader interest in the quality of exchange that becomes possible when two worlds are held together without either being subordinated to the other.
The studio's second pillar is experiential. At Verdi Square on the Upper West Side, the studio is opening a puestito: the open-fronted corner flower stand of Mexican neighborhoods, its atmosphere and its relationship to the street brought to New York intact.
Emiliano Galindo, founder and Creative Director, was born in México City and trained at Central Saint Martins and Parsons School of Design. Before founding Studio Binat, he worked at ProMéxico, the Mexican government trade agency based in New York, helping emerging Mexican designers export their work and build a presence in the US. He built the first full Mexican country pavilion at a New York City design fair across three editions, in partnership with Design Week México, the most influential design platform in Latin America, giving a generation of designers their first international platform. He founded Studio Binat to work at the other end of that exchange.
México is vast.
The studio is moving through it, one collaboration at a time.