The pebbles’ artist

I entered the gray building on the crossing of rua dos Netos and rua dos Ferreiros, in Funchal, and I quickly got lost between the pebbles spread on the floor. I know the Portuguese designer that’s used to being of famous Ted’s conferences is waiting, but at the same time she made it clear she didn’t want me to ask too many questions. Her time, in that as in all other days, is counted in hectic minutes not relaxed hours.

Her time, at the moment I climb the carpeted stairs, embroidered by a white painted wooded railing stairs, is the time to sit for a while in the wide open space of the top floor of the dark gray building, where fifteen people go about their different jobs.

This is where her creations come from, this is where her plans are materialized, this is where the team, subdivided into various specialities, is supervised from. Nothing leaves those computers before being vetted by a pais of light eyes behind black-rimmed glasses, just like the clothes she wears when not using white.

One could think that her life has no colour, that her life, ever since she said her first word – Nini – has no flowers or patterns, but Nini Andrade Silva – she doesn’t remember she’s called Isabel – is a lot more than that. She doesn’t always show it, because it’s not always easy to be able to see her. She spends most of her time stuck in airplanes, flying from one continent to another, chasing the dream she had when she was born, 54 years ago, because she always wanted to be the woman she is today. And that perhaps why she states her age with a smile…

She occasionally lifts her eyes from a computer screen to answer a question made from across the room. She controls everything, wherever she is, and I will understand this later, when I finally manage to sit her for ten minutes at the work table where she almost becomes part of the shop where tourists enter to see her.

I stuck around, almost invisible, seeing her decide one and another thing, only forbidden from photographing the work being made for the future Savoy. I walked down to the lower level, where pebbles are still to be found everywhere. In necklaces and bracelets, in sofas and garden furniture. I felt at home. So much so that in a while, when Nini walked down and joined me to explain a few details of one or two pieces I had seen. Asked me to stay around for a while longer, for she had to solve one or two little things before her next flight, the next day.

She disappeared behind the purple curtain that divides her workstation from the rest of the shop and I heard her at times, on the phone and talking to those descending the stairs. She seems to recognize, by the steps, who’s coming up or down…

Finally, she calls me to join her. She has those miraculous minutes for us to talk about her life, drawn in a straight line, well, forever. Hre brand, like the black or white clothes. I immediately ask what the connection is and the answer, like someone not wishing to lose any time, because shortly someone walking up or down the stairs is ure to need to ask a question, and the answer comes back sooner than I expected.

She sais that if she’s wearing black she’ll put some tennis on and go to the beach, and with heels and a scarf she’ll go out to dinner – with the same trousers and the same tunic. The same is true for white. And, because she’s always moving, if it’s cold she wears black, if it’s warm she wears white. It’s that simple.

She smiles with the eyes. The same eyes who have visualized the hotels she decorates all over the world, and which have earned her the most coveted design awards. She smiles with the hands which have created the art objects that make her recognized throughout the world. Who support the lives of the close to a hundred people that, directly or indirectly, depend on her success. There are salaries to be paid every month, and if she doesn’t create to be good in what she does, she won’t get the commissions that allow her to cover expenses. And she goes back to the colours explanation, saying that if she wore colours, or flower patterns, for example, she would be unable to produce her pieces, as her mind would only produce flowers and drawings with the colours of her clothing, because – as those who know state – it is disturbing.

Nini has a principle in life that I recall. I heard it from her many years ago and I never forgot it. “Backwards, not even to gain momentum”. She smiles. Suddenly she turns towards the curtain and asks, “Is Americo there?”. I get puzzled. She may have remembered to ask something, her mind works like that, and I think she may suddenly have remembered something. Américo comes from the other side of the purple curtain. And Nini introduces the Venezuelan who gave her the sentence for the first time. She repeats it in Spanish. She smiles and gets back to work. So, it’s not hers, but it might just has well have been. Her route through life has always been a straight line, further and further away from her fist years, but always with Madeira as a safe heaven. This is where she feels at home, in a life filled with tricks that perform small magic. Like the habit of always returning to the same rooms, whenever she repeats stays in hotels, to feel just a bit closer to each of them. Which isn’t difficult, as the hotels designer has hotels and prizes spread through various continents. And there isn’t one she likes more than another, all her jobs were special, just as if they were the children she never had.

She wants to do things before “she goes away”, as she puts it. Without wanting to explain what this means, but saying that people thank her for the energy and inspiration she gives them. As she prepares to do, this month, in Ted conferences in Budapest. Like she did in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. She is asked to proffer conferences through the world. And she is happy if a single person in the audience gets the message. She cires easily. She is not insensitive, like the pebbles she designs.

“I am the bringing together of all the people who crossed and cross my life”. She smiles. “I didn’t do anything on my own, and my name is no longer me”. It’s a brand.

She likes to make things happen. To make people dream. She’ll proffer conferences, if necessary, at 10pm, and she likes to pass her energy on to someone. Because people deserve it. At any time.

She talks of the Design Centre. Of the prizes shown there, and the pieces, the first of each collection nowadays spread through the world. It’s an homage to all the people that worked with her, to her parents, that let her be a designer, and a way of people to believe in future professions. Because having that profession in Madeira, thirty years ago, was utopia.

I lean back on the chair, more and more curious as to the date on the table. Before I ask, she launches another of her life’s principles. She doesn’t like boring people, because when she leaves home, everyday, she doesn’t know whether she’ll return, so she lives every day as if it were the last. And she asks people to clear their heads of all that doesn’t matter.

She doesn’t really have a marking moment in her life. She recognizes every single piece she ever created, and knows where they all are, in Miami or Dubai, or in Colombia, a country she fell in love with after, on a first instance, having refused a professional invitation to visit it. She even let the entrepreneurs who invited her know that they could come to Madeira to meet her. She smiles. “They entered my office shortly afterwards to announce that they had come to fetch me to go with them”. She was left with no arguments. And, knowing she is telling me nothing new, she looks to her desk and tells me. On a softer tone. “I did that marvelous hotel, that won the prize as the best hotel in the Americas, Hotel Bog. After that they asked me to do more. There are already eight there”. In a country she swore she would never visit, and where she now feels at home.

“I have the world in my mind”. She smiles again. Before I remind her that even though she carries her works, spread all over the world, in her mind, her heart belongs to Porto Santo. Now I see her soul in her eyes, when she admits she “wouldn’t change it for anything”.

And then, because curiosity got the better of me, I dared to look again to the date written with a white marker on a corner of her desk, and ask her what happened on October 20^th 2016. Nini looks surprised and I point her the date under her elbow. And then she laughs and pushes everything on the table – lots of papers, and samples – away, shrugs her shoulders and answers “nothing, it was the day in which I found this table, a bit scratched, it needed something new, and I called the people from upstairs and the shop to do what they wanted”. And they each drew a little. “And it was great, beautiful, a piece of design, without having to spend any money redoing it”. And they put a date on it.

And this is the person I interviewed. A leader, not a boss. All co-workers know that. She says she’s not cranky, but she is demanding. And especially, she is a friend. “I am not more than anyone else in here, we are all equal. A team, there’s no pyramid”. There’s a line, I say. “Yes, but at one stage, someone has to decide”, she adds.

A big smile on her face, she leans back on the chair. She has energy for all every day. She relaxed for a while, but she quickly went back to her normal rhythm, of wanting to take advantage of every little piece of time in her little corner. To prepare thses “small corners” she gives away, all over the world.

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