Álvaro Catalán de Ocón celebrates 10 years of turning bottles into PET Lamps
Spanish designer Álvaro Catalán de Ocón has created a Madrid Design Competition set up displaying the outcomes of a decade of working with artisans around the globe to rework plastic bottles into woven lamps.
Exhibited at Matadero Madrid, PET Lamp: 10 years weaving tales featured designs created with native craft makers from Ghana, Ethiopia, Chile, Colombia, Thailand, Japan and Australia.
The set up included lamps in an array of sizes and shapes, showcasing how completely different regional communities every have their very own distinctive weaving types and traditions.
First launched in 2012, the PET Lamp undertaking grew out of a way developed by Catalán de Ocón for remodeling a used plastic bottle right into a loom for basket weaving.
Skilled basket weavers then apply their very own weaving methods over the plastic framework, making a woven shade for a pendant lighting fixture.
“We take native bottles and lower them in stripes like a loom, then indigenous communities of weavers intervene with their native fibres,” Catalán de Ocón advised journalists.
“We create the tactic, then they select the colors and the patterns to use,” the designer stated.
The primary version of the PET Lamp, known as Eperara Siapidara, emerged out of a workshop with artisans in Bogotá, Colombia.
Collectively, they developed a design that plaits dyed “paja tetera” fibres, taken from palm or yucca crops, across the PET plastic framework. Each lamp was completely different, however all of them included pre-Hispanic motifs.
From then till 2019 – after which the pandemic made it not possible to scout out new workshops – Catalán de Ocón has began a brand new collaboration yearly.
In 2014, he partnered with craft makers in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Abeba on a set of lamps that use a coiling methodology, whereas a 2015 undertaking in Kyoto, Japan, resulted in intricate bamboo creations.
Two collections had been produced in Chile, following workshops in areas with distinctly completely different traditions, whereas a big cover integrating a number of lights was produced with Aboriginal makers in Ramingining, Australia.
The latest collaboration, in Bolgatanga, Ghana, produced a big twisted design woven in elephant grass.
The PET Lamp has featured in quite a few exhibitions around the globe, at galleries together with at Spazio Rossana Orlandi in Milan and 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo.
For the exhibition at Matadero Madrid, the purpose was to not solely have a good time the completely different design types which have been created through the years, but additionally to shine a light-weight on the makers.
Lamps from every of the eight collections had been suspended from the ceiling alongside beforehand unpublished images of the weavers behind them.
This aligns with Catalán de Ocón’s present technique for PET Lamp, which is to pause on creating new collaborations and as a substitute concentrate on sustaining the present partnerships.
With the price of transportation on the rise, the enterprise is having to work more durable to make the enterprise viable with out overinflating costs.
“Covid made us rethink,” Catalán de Ocón advised Dezeen. “We now have the B Corp stamp, which certifies that we pay properly, use supplies responsibly and hold our carbon as small as attainable.”
“We have already been all around the continents,” he added. “Is it beneficial to maintain accumulating extra? Is not it higher to focus on what we already know?”
“That is why we determined to return to our current communities, to deal with them in addition to we will.”
Different exhibitions displaying as a part of Madrid Design Competition embody totemic designs by Los Ánimas and playful wood furnishings by Inma Bermúdez, Moritz Krefter, Jorge Penadés and Catalán de Ocón.
PET Lamp: 10 years weaving tales was on present at Matadero Madrid from 15 to 26 February as a part of Madrid Design Competition 2023. See Dezeen Occasions Information for extra structure and design occasions around the globe.
