Known for its deposits of bright, white marble—most notably that which lines the domes of the Taj Mahal—the northwest Indian city of Makrana and the vast mineral plains surrounding it, revolve entirely around the trades of mining, refining, and exporting natural stone. For Dushyant Bansal, who hails from a local stoneworking family, the city’s marble-lined streets, stacked high with blocks of veined stone, haphazard piles of offcuts, massive trucks transporting boulders the size of some New York apartments, and a thick, never-ending layer of mineral dust all conjured the familiar image of “home” as he set off to the U.K. in pursuit of a degree in design.
It wasn’t until he returned to this place upon graduation from London’s Royal College of Art that Bansal began to see its distinctive industrial culture in a new light. In 2016, he introduced his hometown to a longtime friend and former RCA classmate, Priyanka Sharma, whose fresh eyes prompted the pair to consider the design opportunities that (literally) lay before them.
Driven by the demands of the luxury market, processing natural stone is often a hugely wasteful process. Minor chips, veins, or other irregular deposits result in the discard of mountains of marble each year. In an effort to recycle and reimagine these discarded fragments, Bansal and Sharma founded Studio Raw Material. Their work is a hyperlocal commentary on the centuries-old practice of natural stone mining in the region—an effort to reduce its wastefulness while also celebrating the resourceful and creative industrial culture that has grown around it.
This approach has garnered the studio international recognition, appearing in shows from the Middle East to Miami. Later this year, Studio Raw Material will make its solo debut at Friedman Benda in New York. Whitewall sat down with the duo to learn more about their regionally rooted process and how it seeks to tackle the ever-pressing questions of circularity.
Photo by Lorenzo Arrigoni, courtesy of Friedman Benda and Studio Raw Material.
WHITEWALL: Your studio is based in western India in the plains of Rajasthan. Can you tell us a bit about this region, its culture, and how this land inspires your work?
STUDIO RAW MATERIAL: The region surrounding our practice is known for its rich mineral deposits. Marble, quartz, sandstone, granite and other crystallized minerals are located in close proximity to clay soils and saline water bodies. The dry terrain surrounding the region is diverse in hue, density and opacity. Makrana, where our studio is located, embodies the most graphic aspects of the region. Makrana is absolutely inseparable from its marble. The mineral has defined the place for centuries and continues to do so today. The name holds little recognition even for Indians, on its own, but is often recalled at the mention of the Taj Mahal, as the source of its white marble and artisanal skill.
Being in Makrana we discovered a new kind of “studio” that was free from its location. The physical studio spills over its hazy boundaries, onto the rest of the town. Even the region surrounding it becomes a creative laboratory for exploration, observation and experimentation. The close encounters with the physical and the metaphysical enable us to zoom in to the rhythms and cadences of the landscape, its sedimentary terrain, the weather, and its effect on the people.
In this rural environment, time seems to stretch and expand in intriguing ways, inviting a shift in our perception that profoundly expands our imagination. This expansion allows for reconsideration of time not just as linear, but as a multifaceted experience that flows beneath us, above us, within us, and beyond us.
“In this rural environment, time seems to stretch and expand in intriguing ways,”
Studio Raw Material
WW: Your portfolio consists of furnishings and objects made from upcycled architectural waste. When and how did you develop this methodology?
SRM: As splinters of cultural importance, wasteful debris in the form of fragments provides traces of their past and have helped form a better understanding of the physical world. For us, the concept of wholeness, and the value of fragments and offcuts delve into deep philosophical and aesthetic territories, questioning how we define completeness and find meaning in what seems incomplete or discarded.
Due to the scale of production and conventional value perceptions of the material, there is a colossal amount of waste generated by the local stone industry. Working predominantly with discarded stone materials is a fundamental part of our practice.
We have been friends for a long time, and when we met 15 years ago, I invited Priyanka to visit Makrana—my home. Her reaction to the surreal landscape on her first visit prompted me to see it afresh. Wanting to work together ever since, we managed to make small experiments and studies with craftspeople here, finding time between our jobs. We gradually started showing some of our initial work by the end of 2016, but it took us another year to set up the studio formally.
We see our work as a way to reimagine materials and redefine notions of value. Besides, when you go to the source of an industry, you find an excess of material that is almost free, so it was a practical choice for us to use it. Working with constraints really pushes one to explore every aspect of our surroundings, and Makrana did that for us.
Studio Raw Material’s Creative Process
Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Studio Raw Material.
WW: Can you describe your studio and its process? How many hands touch each of the pieces you produce and how much time does this process require?
SRM: Our studio in Makrana is located across its small railway station, where the process of working the stone takes place in a modest industrial shed. It lies in one of the older industrial parts of the town that has large workshops for stone work around piles of marble rocks and offcuts used by the craftspeople. The noise of stone chisels and electric grinders is punctuated by wailing calls of numerous peafowls that live in the old, overgrown trees on the land. A hundred year old house lies beside this shed, which we use as a studio.
“We see our work as a way to reimagine materials and redefine notions of value,”
Studio Raw Material
Instead of looking at design as a formal methodology, we work more intuitively in our studio, through making and sampling ideas. In fact, drawings are sometimes the last stage of our process, more to document what has been made. Our practice is based here in the countryside and is greatly influenced by its indigenous design practices. Free from formal standards, it is often radically simple and unexpected as a means to achieve the required function.
We collect, sort, and archive everything within our studio and workshop in Makrana. In a way, our studio in Makrana is a slow laboratory which focuses on collecting, sorting, studying, archiving materials and making our earlier works. We have had another studio in Jaipur for the last two years, where we make most of our new work, which needs our constant involvement. The thinking and making is more immediate here. We are a team of 25 people in Makrana and Jaipur combined, and most of us are part of all stages of the process from finding the offcuts to the final crating of the works for transportation. We are constantly researching, documenting and experimenting with various materials. It usually takes us around a year to fully form a new body of work.
Responding to the Urgencies of Our Time
Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Studio Raw Material.
WW: Two of your recent works, the Khokhar Seat and the Khokhar Console, appeared in a recent exhibition at Friedman Benda. Titled “Under Present Conditions,” the exhibition was a survey of responses to the urgencies of our time by leading contemporary designers. Can you describe the meaning behind these pieces and how exactly they respond to this prompt?
SRM: The Khokhar seat and console reflect the eroding geological landscape constantly being reshaped by rapid industrial activity. The works use marble fragments from construction sites that are reconstituted into sculptural landscapes. The compositions both seem to, and resist puzzling back together—forming and coming undone at the same time, responding to ecological fragility we are all experiencing.
The use of marble scrap explores a coarse, fossil-like aesthetic, reminiscent of a ruin, a subconscious response to the current geo-political unrest. The extremely slow process of composing collected fragments felt like an exercise in making sense of a broken world, a suspended state of inequality and uncertainty.
“The extremely slow process of composing collected fragments felt like an exercise in making sense of a broken world,”
Studio Raw Material
While this is an apparent aspect of the global urgency, there are some local concerns that these works try to respond to. These works from our Khokhar series attempt to draw attention to indigenous building practices in rural India that have existed away from urban centers and are slowly vanishing from the landscape. Exploring vernacular thought enables our practice to focus on alternate ways of living and working in places with many limitations.
WW: Questions of overconsumption, scarcity, and waste are central to the current dialogue. How does your studio seek to address these questions and how do you imagine your process will evolve given the current landscape?
SRM: As a studio based in India, a country with immense disparities in access to resources, we are always drawn to the incredible inventiveness of its people’s daily life. Using unpretentious, simple construction methods of local materials, vernacular design articulates local culture, local economy, and local environmental awareness. A fundamental principle of the approach is to make do with very little and work within the economy of means. In rural communities, sustainability is evident and livable as a daily practice.
“A fundamental principle of the approach is to make do with very little and work within the economy of means,”
Studio Raw Material
Our approach to design is based on how we would like to live. Observing and being attentive to the regional materials, influences, everyday objects and evolving vernacular practices to address current scenarios.
Our work explores “connection to a place” by calling attention to the local materials and geography, combining it with native skill, grounded in the context where all these different aspects exist together. We aim to keep it within an ecosystem without scaling it, always sensitive to what it means for the community that we work with.
A Perfect Progression for Studio Raw Material
Studio Raw Material, “Khokhar Coffee Table,” 2024, marble offcuts, 17 x 56 x 59 inches, courtesy of Friedman Benda and Studio Raw Material.
WW: What are you working on now? Anything new and exciting you can tease or tell us about?
SRM: While working with stone, we wanted to explore other materials within our regional landscape. Paper seemed like a strangely perfect progression—as a craft indigenous to this region that also sits at the opposite end to stone in its materiality. It is a real change of pace as the process of working with stone is intensive and noisy, while that of paper is quiet and almost meditative.
We are very excited for our solo show with Friedman Benda later this year! In February we presented a small installation at the India Art Fair, where we showed a large body of work within our home country for the first time.
Studio Raw Material, Rock Paper Scissors Table Lamp, bamboo, Sunn hemp paper, thread, marble offcuts, 43 x 41 x 35 inches, courtesy of Friedman Benda and Studio Raw Material.
