Thank you for coming. I apologise in advance, I don't have much time, but I didn't want to miss the opportunity to clarify some doubts that came up the other day when we were introduced. What I didn't expect was for the conversation to be recorded. I find it hard to place the office. I was told you were a design office, but when I looked at your website I didn't find exactly that. Or not only that. And when we were introduced I also found out there's only one person behind it.

I hope there's no problem with the recording. Yes, it's a one-person office with the capacity to expand. And I understand that can be disconcerting when the name says office, but calling it an office is not about appearances, it is about meaning. As in any office, what is produced here is neither seen nor touched. That's the foundation of an office. It means working with what has no form yet, with ideas and concepts. The name is quite precise, actually.

But it is a design office, isn't it?

Not exactly. I feel more comfortable talking about an office of concepts. The starting point is always meaning. Understanding what something is before giving it form. Sometimes that becomes design, and design can perfectly be an end in itself, but always from a deep understanding of what is being done and why. Without that prior conceptual analysis, design resolves the surface and becomes mere decoration. But the office also works in advisory roles and curatorial tasks. Behind all of it is the same idea that approaching things through the lens of design or artistic thinking opens up ways of understanding that other methods cannot. And that is something we are also bringing to business and institutional contexts, where this kind of analysis is beginning to make a great deal of strategic sense.

But there's something more, isn't there? Because it's not purely a functional matter.

No, there's also a conceptual dimension. I'm interested in the idea of the office as a structure, a system with its own internal logic, procedures, and a way of organising what comes in and goes out. And what interests me is that this structure can be activated anywhere. An office doesn't need a fixed location, it needs a logic that works. In that sense, you are what you do, not where you do it.

Yes, that's what I understood when I saw the phrases on your website that describe the office.

Exactly! I'm glad you found them.

Going back to what the office does... what does it do, exactly?

The first thing that happens in any project is trying to understand what the real challenge actually is. Analysing whether what has been described corresponds to reality. Often there's something underneath. One of the objectives is to avoid leaks. Someone thinks they need a catalogue when they actually need a way to tell something that has gone untold for years. Someone thinks they need an identity when they actually need a criteria. I work more in that layer than in formal resolution, and the formal resolution comes on its own once everything is in place.

And how does all this fit into a commission?

In practice a commission arrives like anywhere else. Someone needs a publication, an identity, an exhibition, and asks for it. What changes is working from honesty. There's one premise that runs through everything: respect for content. It's not unusual for the process to reveal that the original commission wasn't fully aligned with what the content actually needed. It's very easy to work on the aesthetic surface without engaging with the real needs. That's precisely where the office doesn't work. Internally, any decision made has to be able to answer two whys. If it can't, it doesn't get taken.

How do you define yourself within all this? Are you a designer, an editor, a curator?

It depends on the project. And sometimes all three at once. I find it hard to separate them because in practice they aren't separate. The office operates in that zone where roles become indistinct. What unites them is conceptual analysis. From there, you decide whether what the project needs is design, editing, curating, or a combination of all of them.

And curating? Because that's a territory that's usually very clearly defined.

I'm more comfortable with an idea that revolves around concepts. In any case, curating is fundamentally a way of thinking about the relationships between things, what goes with what, why, and from which angle. In short, it's about building a concept logically. That logic isn't exclusive to exhibitions. It's there in how a book is organised, how an archive is sequenced, and how you decide what enters a project and what doesn't. The office has worked from that position many times.

I imagine that difficulty in explaining what the office does is what led to the motto on the business card you gave me: OFFICE OF CONCEPTS, AMBIGUOUS ENTITY.

Exactly. It's a way to prepare for it. Instead of trying to explain everything every time, the motto already shows that this doesn't fit into a simple category. Ambiguity here isn't a lack of definition, and it's a precise description of something that operates between disciplines. And naming it that way is more honest than inventing a term that doesn't exist.

I see the office has other cards with other taglines. CONCEPT GARDEN FOR INFORMATION CIRCULATION... BOOKS HOLD WHAT EXHIBITIONS REVEAL. There's a card for everything.

There's more intention in those cards than meets the eye. They're a way of speaking the office's language without having to explain it every time. OFFICE OF CONCEPTS, AMBIGUOUS ENTITY we've already discussed. CONCEPT GARDEN FOR INFORMATION CIRCULATION is perhaps the most organic description of what happens here. The idea of a garden has to do with care. It means letting a concept grow in the right conditions before giving it form. And the circulation of information connects directly with the nature of an office that works with ideas and communication as raw material. There's another tagline that isn't on the cards but appears in the form. A GARDEN SMALL ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU FEEL HUGE. It refers to the office's scale. Being small and going to the core of things allows for a greater expansion than the size might suggest. And the latest one is BOOKS HOLD WHAT EXHIBITIONS REVEAL, which was born to explain something the office firmly believes. The editorial and the exhibitionary are two fields that work at the same level. They need each other and complete each other.

That last one interests me especially. What do you mean exactly when you say the editorial and the exhibitionary work at the same level?

That at their core they do the same thing, even if it doesn't seem that way. Both work with content spatially. An exhibition organises space so that something can be traversed and understood. A publication does the same, but the space is the page. In both cases there is a sequence, there are decisions about what comes before and what comes after, there is a rhythm that conditions how what is being seen or read is received. Every space traversed and every page unfolded are in fact the same operation. What changes is the medium, not the logic. And once you understand that, designing an exhibition and designing a book stop being two different things.

So the office can handle both in a single commission? In art centres we often work with each area separately, assuming they're very different.

Of course. And that's exactly where it makes sense to work with an office of concepts. The logic that runs through both fields is integrated from the beginning. Depending on the project's needs, the office expands and works with architects or other profiles that can complement the work. But the conceptual thread that connects the editorial and the exhibitionary always lives in the office.

Time is running out but there are still things I want to understand before we close. What is the office's relationship with language? It appears throughout everything you do but it's never fully explained.

Language is the backbone of everything. I'm interested in written language and its internal logic, the kind that dictates that after a full stop comes a capital letter, that a blank space also communicates, and that every punctuation mark is there for a reason. Ladislav Sutnar understood this better than anyone when he redesigned the Bell telephone directories in the sixties. He didn't change a single number. He only organised how they were read. A small typographic gesture that changed how millions of people processed information. That's what interests me about language. Not as a subject, but as a method. Transversal to almost everything, from how something is written to how it is placed on a page or within an identity. It even has a presence in art. That territory interests me enormously. And then there's the other end. Institutions and organisations where the management of written language is fundamental for a message to land with precision.

I also see some pieces on the table related to language, and I read something in the form that made me think. In fact the form itself could be an artistic piece. Does the office also have an artistic practice?

Yes. Part of the office's research has naturally led to that practice. The same relationship with language, with the idea of the office, with materials... at some point that stops being design or research and becomes something else. It's not a separate territory. It's a consequence of following the questions all the way to the end.

I noticed on the website there's a section called active-archive. What is that exactly?

Commissions go out into the world, which is where they belong. But they also form the active-archive. It's not a storage space or a source of inspiration. It's a practice in itself. A way of analysing, of establishing connections between things that apparently have none, of better understanding where one operates from.

You mentioned materials earlier. What role do they play exactly?

They're not aesthetic decisions. They're content decisions. The materials don't repeat the idea, they expand it. And it's not only about what the materials are, but about how they're presented. How they unfold on a page or in an exhibition space, what relationships they establish with what surrounds them, how they condition the time of whoever moves through it. All of that is part of how what's inside is received. And then there's the void, which is not an absence but the place where the idea breathes and metabolises. The hardest material to manage is always that one: the one that can't be seen.

I imagine that relates to the discomfort you mentioned feeling around "photobooks".

It's a territory that makes me uncomfortable, which is exactly why it interested me. I came from the world of information management and typography (occasionally type design), and for seven years I taught typography in a university master's programme. Text was my handle. Photography books (which are still books) barely have any text, which left me without familiar tools. So I decided to enter that territory precisely for that reason, to try to develop solutions from a different place, from the idea of the book as an object, from the materials, and from what happens when the content is not verbal but the medium is still editorial.

I'd love to keep going but I really have no more time. I'll take the idea of the office with me. It's been very interesting.

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. I hope we can collaborate soon.