Dozie Kanu has had a lot going on recently, and as a result, when we catch up for this interview, he tells me that he’s struggling to find energy. He says it lightly, almost in passing, but it frames the rest of our conversation, and sets us off honestly.

Given that we’re speaking ahead of Milan Design Week – the design industry’s busiest moment, where literally hundreds of events are set to take place – it’s understandable. Here, Kanu himself will launch a new collection with Knoll, one of the most historically significant names in modern design. “It’s not even slowing down, it’s amping up!” he says, jokingly, when I ask if there’s any light at the end of the busy tunnel.

Despite taking a lot of his attention of late, the Knoll collaboration, on paper, is a clear milestone. His first project at this scale within industrial design: the collection will be made up of a series of leather and steel pieces, softened by cascading tassels that hover just above the ground, shifting slightly when you move around them.

But the more we talk, the less it feels like a “moment” in the traditional sense. He doesn’t frame it that way. If anything, he keeps circling back the way it relates to his wider practice. “I use design as a conceptual tool,” he says. “It’s a way to bring people in.”

That idea comes up more than once, in slightly different forms. It’s clear that accessibility matters to him, but not in a reductive way. His work often starts with something familiar, chairs, tables, objects that feel legible, before shifting into something that pushes a more conceptual view.

With these pieces, which are an extension of a work Kanu created in 2021, that shift happens through movement. The tassels sway, almost imperceptibly at times, catching light, catching your attention. He describes them as something that changes the object, makes it feel alive in a way that’s hard to pin down. “It commands an emotional response,” he says.

What’s interesting is how easily this project folds into everything else he’s doing. There isn’t a sense of him stepping into design so much as stretching what’s already there. He resists the idea of being positioned within “collectible design,” or really any category that feels too fixed.

“Within design, it just becomes about the product,” he says. “I can allude to function without the object actually having to perform it.” At one point, he describes himself as an exhibition maker, which feels like the closest thing to a definition. Not because it narrows things down, but because it opens them up. Exhibitions, for him, are spaces where things can coexist without needing to resolve. “Within an exhibition, anything can exist,” he says. “There’s not a prescribed way to view anything.”

That way of thinking seems to extend into how he’s structured his life as well. In 2018, he moved from New York to Portugal, settling in a warehouse space about an hour outside Lisbon. When he talks about it, it’s less about escape and more about possibility, what happens when certain pressures fall away. “Moving to Portugal was one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made.” In New York, he describes a process that was constantly in motion, objects moving between different workshops, dictated by cost and logistics. In Portugal, things slowed down. “Having space changes everything,” he says. “Things can just be there, and then at a certain point they tell you what they want to become.”

It’s an evocative image, the idea of objects sitting quietly until something shifts. It also feels slightly at odds with the pace of everything else he’s describing now. The scale of his work has grown, the expectations around it too, and there’s a sense that the outside world is harder to ignore than it once was. “There’s this search for meaning in a time when meaning feels sparse,” he says.

He talks about the recent opening of his exhibition in Milan, and the disconnect he felt there, between the work, the audience, and everything else happening beyond that room. It’s one of the few moments where his tone shifts slightly. “I gave so much of myself,” he says. “And it was just kind of a bunch of rich, white collectors.”

He half-laughs when he says it, but not enough to dismiss it. The questions seem to sit there: who the work is for, and what it means to place it within systems that don’t always feel built for you.

That tension carries quietly into the Knoll project as well. A brand whose history is defined by a very particular lineage, now intersecting with a practice that has never quite fit those terms. He doesn’t overstate it, but the shift is there, and is visible if you’re looking for it. He credits a lot of this shift to the current design director, Jonathan Olivares, who was the instigator behind Kanu’s Knoll collaboration. “He belongs at Knoll,” Olivares tells me.

“Knoll is a design company founded on deliberately looking outwards, away from furniture, to bring new ideas to the field of interiors, and Dozie’s work lent itself naturally to this mission. He represents a singular cultural point of view within his generation of artists.”

It doesn’t come across as a declaration so much as something he’s navigating in real time. There’s a similar subtlety in the references that sit inside the work itself. The tassels draw, loosely, from Nigerian masquerade traditions, but also from Texan cowboy culture – two parts of his background that don’t announce themselves so much as sit within the material language. Nothing is over-explained. It doesn’t need to be.

As we come back around to Milan, it feels almost secondary. The launch will happen, the objects will be seen, documented, and circulated. But it’s the process that has been the real focus for Kanu. “I need to feel something,” and to be around people who I want to learn from.”

It’s a simple way of putting it, but it lingers a bit. Because underneath everything, the new collection, the scale, the visibility, there’s still that same impulse running through it. Not to present things that are fully resolved, or to fix meaning in place. But for his work to keep moving.