September 11, 2026 |
Luna Romanovna is a Paris-based designer whose studio, Rmnva (a summarised version of her surname), makes what she has coined Contemporary Sound Sculptures – DJ booths built to professional spec that function as collectible design objects. They are bespoke, produced in tiny editions and headed for residences, hotels, galleries and institutions, rather than the club circuit. Until this month they existed only as renders, digital images she designed using AI and other tools, which circulated online where nobody was quite sure whether they could be real.
“The DJ, despite being the source of an event’s entire energy, is often pushed to the back of the room behind a booth regarded as little more than technical equipment,” says Romanovna. “To me, the DJ booth is the beating heart of a space. It is where energy originates, circulates through the room, brings people together and creates collective emotions.” Some venues have started to agree, moving the DJ into the centre of the dancefloor – a shift she likes, because it changes the relationship between artist, audience and space entirely.
Anyone who has stood in a club knows the object she means: a trestle table wrapped in gaffer tape, barely noticed alongside the DJ, treated as purely technical equipment. “A traditional DJ booth is designed to hold equipment,” she says. “A Sound Sculpture is designed to hold an experience. Even in silence, it should retain a powerful presence.”
Alien is the first piece to exist physically. It has sculptural volumes, integrated lighting and a silhouette that shifts between futurist geometry and something organic, with the speakers built into the body so sound radiates almost 360 degrees. The effect is faintly extraterrestrial, exactly as the name suggests. “The booth no longer simply hosts the performance,” she says. “It actively participates in its diffusion.” Getting there took months, and a chain of engineers, 3D artists, craftsmen and specialist workshops.
Nothing is hidden, by design. “I wanted to create booths that can be experienced from every angle,” she says, “objects that people can walk around freely, without a hidden side.” No cable-strewn back, no side that only works in a photograph. A piece with no bad angle can sit in the middle of a gallery floor rather than against a club wall, and photographs as well from any side – which is how the booths found an audience long before one existed.
Her references run from Space Age design to brutalism and retrofuturism, some utopian and some considerably less so, and the finish of photography and haute couture. “They each propose powerful visions of the future,” says Romanovna. “I have always admired creators who build such a distinctive universe that their vision can be recognised at first glance.” Each piece is conceived as a character with its own identity and story, protagonists in the larger universe she is assembling.
Most designers move from sketch to prototype to product. Romanovna works differently, starting with a finished image and reverse-engineering her way back to it, with proportions, assemblies and manufacturing methods all worked out from the render. “We often begin with a vision that already appears complete, and then we must completely deconstruct it in order to understand how to make it real,” she says. “Each project becomes an act of translation.”
AI runs through all of it, entering after the moodboards, materials and colour, though not as the shortcut its reputation suggests. “Contrary to what many people imagine, the final image never appears instantly,” says Romanovna. “I spend hours refining, modifying, deleting, starting over. AI allows me to externalise my imagination and make visible ideas that previously existed only in my mind. But it remains just one tool among many.” The render isn’t the end of the process but the brief for it.
There is an irony in how the studio works. What circulated freely as images arrives as its opposite: each piece is made in numbers small enough to interest collectors, some unique, others in very limited editions. An object almost nobody can own began as one anyone could scroll past.
More Sound Sculptures are in development across new materials, scales and typologies, as the studio works towards what Romanovna calls a sculptural language for sound. “A piece should be just as captivating when it is being used as when it stands silently within a space,” she says. “Every project begins as an almost impossible vision, and ends as something that can be touched, used and experienced.”
Photography courtesy of Romanovna.
