by Spanish designer Álvaro Catalán de Ocón created an installation for the Madrid Design Festival that shows the results of ten years of work with artisans around the world to convert plastic bottles into woven lamps.
On display at Matadero Madrid, PET Lamp: 10 years of weaving stories featured designs created with local artisans from Ghana, Ethiopia, Chile, Colombia, Thailand, Japan and Australia.
The installation included lamps in a range of shapes and sizes, reflecting how different regional communities have their own unique weaving styles and traditions.
The first project was launched in 2012, the PET Lamp project grew out of a method developed by Catalán de Ocón to transform a used plastic bottle into a loom for basket weaving.
Experienced basket weavers then apply their own weaving techniques to the plastic framework, creating a woven shade for a pendant lighting fixture.
“We take local bottles and cut them into strips like a loom, then indigenous communities of weavers intervene with their local fibers,” Catalán de Ocón told journalists.
“We create the method, then they choose the colors and patterns to apply,” said the designer.
The first edition of the PET Lamp, called Eperara Siapidara, arose from a workshop with artisans in Bogotá, Colombia.
Together, they developed a design that stretches colored “paja tetera” fibers, taken from palm or yucca plants, around the PET plastic framework. Each lamp was different, but all included pre-Hispanic motifs.
From then until 2019 – and after that it was not possible to find new workshops due to the pandemic – Catalán de Ocón has started a new collaboration every year.
In 2014, he partnered with craft makers in the Ethiopian capital Addis Abeba on a collection of lamps that use a winding method, and a 2015 project in Kyoto, Japan resulted in the creation of twisted bamboo.
Two collections were produced in Chile, following workshops in regions with very different traditions, and a large canopy integrating multiple lights was produced by Aboriginal makers in Ramingining, Australia.
The most recent collaboration, in Bolgatanga, Ghana, resulted in a large intricate design woven in elephant grass.
The PET Lamp has been featured in many exhibitions around the world, at galleries including Spazio Rossana Orlandi in Milan and 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo.
For the exhibition at Matadero Madrid, the aim was not only to celebrate the different design styles created over the years, but also to shine a light on the makers.
Lamps from each of the eight collections were suspended from the ceiling alongside unpublished photographs of the weavers behind them.
This is in line with Catalán de Ocón’s current strategy for PET Lamp, which is to stop creating new collaborations and instead focus on maintaining existing partnerships.
With the cost of transport increasing, the business has to work harder to make the business viable without raising prices.
“Covid made us rethink,” Catalán de Ocón told Dezeen. “We have the B Corp stamp, which confirms that we pay well, use materials responsibly and keep our carbon footprint as low as possible.”
“We are already across the continent,” he said. “Is it valuable to keep collecting more? Isn’t it better to focus on what we already know?”
“That’s why we decided to go back to the communities we already have, treat them as well as we can.”
Other exhibits shown as part of the Madrid Design Festival include totemic designs by Los Ánimas and playful wooden furniture by Inma Bermúdez, Moritz Krefter, Jorge Penadés and Catalán de Ocón.
PET Lamp: 10 years of weaving stories were exhibited at Madrid’s Matadero from 15 to 26 February as part of the Madrid Design Festival 2023. See the Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.
