In January 2019 I had the amazing opportunity to be invited for an artistic residency and workshop at DLab USFQ in Ecuador by my very good friend and amazing researcher Cristina Muñoz to work together on Biofabricated textiles based on starch and natural colorants.
Our collaboration began in 2017, through a collaboration fund from the Universidad de San Francisco, on biomaterials applied to textile fabrication that allowed us to work in distance as co-researchers together with a team of chemical engineers and designers from Ecuador. I was in charge of the methodological supervision in prototyping bio-fabrics and assessing the development of the biomaterials, the fabrication techniques and the product design. As the conclusion of the project, I was invited for a three week artistic residency together with a series of workshops and a public lecture at USFQ.
During the residency we explored developed further the recipes of starch based bioplastics, explored natural colorants, codesigned a series of garments and established the fabrication protocols for producing them. We experimented with cochineal, since Ecuador has large production of this natural red colorant, whose primary constituent is carminic acid, that is made of the dried and pulverized bodies of female cochineal insects and is used to color food and cosmetics. (freedictionary)
The pattern of this soluble swimsuit aims to bring awareness around the “plastic floating islands” that travel in the open sea.
The pattern was made by using a database by the Sea Education Association showing the urgency
Floating plastic debris sampling in the North Atlantic, by the Sea Education Association.
STARTS Grand Prize – Innovative Collaboration: Awarded for innovative collaboration between industry or technology and the arts that opens new pathways for innovation.
Over the last 30 years, plastic production has increased by 620%.
In Catalonia alone, every day, 720,000 kg of food is thrown away. This wasted food, totaling 260,000 tons per year, is equivalent to the food needs of 500,000 people for one year. Remix el Barrio was born with the ambition to propose a learning space to encourage and nurture new practices based on food-waste crafts. It is the result of a pilot program where various designers learn about biomaterial design and explore projects with food scraps using artisanal techniques and digital fabrication. Remix El Barrio was created in the regenerative district of Poblenou, more specifically in the ecosystem of Fab Lab Barcelona, where designers united to co-produce new forms of crafts from their individual aspirations, benefiting from regular peer-learning sessions, access to machines and tools, and learning from the maker open source culture present all over the place. Each designer has initiated a creative design driven material innovation approach where they identify a recurrent local food waste case, learn about its characteristics, investigate how to best collect and process it, and imagine future applications and material life-cycle narratives.
Guided and mentored by experts from the field at Fab Lab Barcelona, they experimented with different recipes for making materials with appropriate flexibility, strength, and esthetics, and tested diverse fabrication techniques, from molding to extrusion, laser cutting, CNC milling, and 3D printing. Each project could have entered into an iterative loop of prototyping, fed by intrinsic people creativity and interactions with peers, lab gurus, external experts, local providers, and future users. This resulted in a strong diversity of projects with outstanding circular narratives, materials, products, and services:
KOFI: Making paper and packaging from coffee husks, by Dihue Miguens Ortiz
RE-OLIVAR: Creating design objects such as lamps, chairs, and tiles from olive pits, by Silvana Catazine y Josean Vilar of Naifactory
EN(DES)USO: A poetic approach to materialities using eggshells and yerba mate for design artefacts, by Lara Campos
SQUEEZE THE ORANGE: A jacket made of vegan fruit leather based on orange peel, by Elisenda Jaquemot, Susana Jurado Gavino y Nuria Bonet Roca
COLORES, Empowering natural dyes from avocado pits, by Giorgia Filippelli
DULCE DE PIEL, Making Soaps from used oils, by Clara Davis
ORGANIC MATTER, Designing a platform about regenerative circular design, by Laura Freixas
LOOK MA NO HANDS, 3D printing cookies from fruit peel and skins, by Secil Asfar
CIRCULAR GOS, Making snacks for pets from restaurant food leftovers with environmental awareness, by Arleny Medina of Leka Restaurant
BIOPANTONE, a collaborative artwork of nature´s color palette with natural dyes, conceived by Anastasia Pistofidou and made by Fabricademy alumni 2019
Beyond the pilot, Remix has transformed into a collective that experiences circularity, not only by creating materials with local food leftovers but also by exploring collaboration, inclusiveness, and self-management towards shared knowledge with local actors and global outreach.
The Remixers’ leitmotiv: “We are exploring new practices to stop wasting our time and our resources and act at a local scale to foster more social circular practices. We collaborate and involve local agents from the neighborhood such as restaurants, urban gardens, and neighborhood associations, to promote a local circular economy ecosystem. We affirm the potential of co-design, digital manufacturing, and crafts to reinvent our ways of producing, consuming, and living with awareness of the environmental ecosystem. We claim the need to imagine new models and techniques to innovate with what we commonly call ‘waste’. We value innovative and artistic practices as a motor for social change. We are convinced that living shared design experiences can facilitate the empowerment of territories to implement a circular economy.”
Credits
Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC represented by the project team Anastasia Pistofidou, Marion Real and Milena Juarez Calvo. Fab Lab Barcelona is an innovation center rethinking the way we live, work, and play in cities. Located at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), it provides access to the tools, knowledge and means to educate, innovate and invent using technology and digital fabrication to allow anyone to make (almost) anything. The institution supports contemporary educational and research programs related to the multiple scales of the human habitat. Fab Lab Barcelona is also the headquarters of the global coordination of the Fab Academy program in collaboration with the Fab Foundation and the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms.
Anastasia Pistofidou is a digital fabrication expert, wearables and e-textiles practitioner, biomaterial maker, and educator. Part of the Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC team since 2011 as a tutor, advanced manufacturing office manager, coordinator and researcher she is currently leading the Materials and Textiles strategic area. In 2013 she co-founded FabTextiles and in 2017 she co-founded Fabricademy, a new Textile Academy, a globally distributed program that explores the implications and applications of new technologies at the intersection of textiles, digital fabrication and biology. She also works as a content curator for Fab Foundation.
Marion Real is a systemic design researcher exploring co-creation processes in the territorial transformations toward circular economies and cosmopolitan localism. She is currently working at Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC where she has coordinated the 10 pilots in the SISCODE project, including Remix el Barrio. She is also associate researcher at Estia, Chaire
Bali and Centre for Circular Design.
Milena Juarez Calvo is a Brazilian environmental engineer with master’s in Interdisciplinary Studies in Environmental, Economic and Social Sustainability and specialization in Urban and Industrial Ecology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She currently coordinates the CENTRINNO Barcelona pilot at IAAC and works as an action researcher for the SISCODE, FoodSHIFT and REFLOW EU projects.
The Remixers collective has emerged as a group incubated in Fab Lab Barcelona within the SISCODE EU project pilot. They experience the value of co-creation and open knowledge and formed a group of like-minded individuals who defend sustainability, cooperativism, shared infrastructures, and circular glocalism. They wish to further collaborate in establishing a space to experiment with local food waste and biofabrication with a goal to connect with local services, activate circularity, and scale up by collaborating with open-minded and visionary industries. The Remixers is formed by Arleny Medina, Clara Davis, Dihue Miguens, Elisenda Jaquemot, Giorgia Filipellini, Joseán Vilar, Lara Campos, Laura Freixas, Nuria Bonet Roca, Secil Asfar, Silvana Catazine, Susana Jurado Gavino and local agents from Poblenou and Barcelona.
Remix el Barrio is part of the SISCODE project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation under grant agreement programme nº788217.
Jury Statement
Remember the 19th century Arts & Crafts Movement? Remix el Barrio can be seen as translation of Arts & Crafts into our times, confronting well-known contemporary issues with manufacturing and consumption in our daily life. Remix El Barrio is a collective of designers who propose projects with food leftovers using artisan techniques and digital manufacturing. They collaborate with agents from the Poblenou neighborhood to promote a more local and circular ecosystem. In their manifesto they want to “promote artisan-manufacturing sites and designer/craftsman cooperatives in the development of short-loop products, creating direct synergies with neighborhood actors, facilitate the access and the rehabilitation of abandoned sites, support logistics, and partnerships between local actors.”
The jury was most impressed by the wide array of beautifully up-cycled products made from waste—ranging from dye colors made from avocado stones, bioplastics out of orange peel, soaps from used oil, or paper made of coffee peels. Their initiative, Organic Matters, explores the intersection between design, biology, chemistry, technology, material science, community, and self-sufficiency. It could be interpreted as a reformulation of the STARTS idea itself.
Materia Bruta is a Limited collection of garments from new and old biomaterials
Bacterial-dyed buryat modernised dress
Presenting a year-long collaboration with Surzana Radnaeva from Traditional Futures that was supported by Worth Partnership project. This garment was made from Bacterial-dyed linen using Shibori tie-dye technique. The design is inspired by Surzhana’s Buryat traditional costume «Degel». It directly relates to and nourishes her explorations within the Traditional Futures brand. This brand is about modernization of traditional costumes, and making them continue living, being worn and not end up behind the glass in museums. It is exciting to see how old things meet new things in harmony, I think its a right way to live.
Algae-based vest Charcoal-dyed and reinforced with wool fibers.
Surzhana loved the alien look of this material that she asked for this specific design the moment she touched it. I helped her get inspiration from the material, through the way it feels- and imagine the ready garment.
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Another piece that was produced during this project is Amadou fungi hat made by one of the last artisans in Transylvania. The design of this hat is inspired by Buryat traditional hat, after having consulted Surzhana about fungi biomaterial producers. She combined the fungus material and the traditional hat design will the intention to prolong life of both disappearing traditions.
Working with organic waste can bring circular solutions for the implementation of closed loops of organic feedstocks. At Fab Textiles we have been working with food waste since October 2018 and many researchers through their internship developed and evolved recipes for making food waste biocomposites. There are already some small companies that produce bioleathers with waste, one of them from Mexico called ECOPLASO that I had the possibility to get to know in one of my conferences at ¨Demand Solutions¨ in Miami 2018.
RECIPE / COFFEE BIOLEATHER
2G sodium alginate
2G dried coffee grains of any organic waste in powder
2G olive oil
5G glycerin
33G water
(everything is in grams using a precision scale)
MIX for calcification
7G of calcium chloride in 100ml of water
Various organic waste bio-leather samples
STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS:
1- Weight all the ingredients with a precision scale.
2- Mix the powder together with the glycerin and the olive oil.
3- Add the water and use a mechanical blender to obtain an homogeneous solution.
4- Cast in a silk screen print frame ( you can create your own using any textile and wood)
5- Mix the Calcium chloride with water in a sprayer bottle.
6- Spray the biomaterial on top and bottom with the calcium chloride solution.
7- Let the calcium chloride act for 5´ and rinse with clean water.
8- Let the composite sample dry in a dry and warm place for one week. Depending on the thickness and the size of the sample it may take longer. It will also vary due to the local temperature and humidity.
9- When the product is dry you can separate it from the frame.
Note: As the sample dries, it can become curved, so place it between two level surfaces and some weight on top so at the end we can obtain a really flat sheet
The laser cut pattern can be found and downloaded HERE
