Are the containers in your recycling bin talking to you? In the last few years a lot of people have made attempts to give empty bottles a second life. One of the most artful we’ve come across is Alvaro Catalán de Ocón’s PET lamp project.
The Barcelona-based designer—a 2004 graduate of Central St. Martin’s school of art in London—came up with the concept of combining traditional wickerwork with castoff plastic bottles. In 2011, Catalán de Ocón unveiled the first PET collection, a series of colorful, hatlike pendant lights fabricated by artisans in Colombia. More recently, in collaboration with Si Studio, he’s brought the design idea to a group of wicker artisans in Chile, resulting in a new series, Chimbarongo PET lights, named after the city near Santiago where the shades are woven.
The tradition in Chile is to use natural, rather than dyed, wicker, so this collection gets its subtle coloring from the soda bottles themselves. Catalán de Ocón plans to keep introducing the PET concept to different weaving communities around the world, and to continue his mission of “searching for alternatives of production" and ways to fuse "original artisanal and industrial techniques.” As he says, “The PET Lamp for us has become a pretext for getting to know different countries and cultures and to enter into the lives of people in a manner that would not have been possible any other way.
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