Petlamp

"In the Summer of 2011, on a visit to Colombia, I was invited to form part of an attractive project focussed on the reuse of plastic bottles PET. Hélène Le Drogou, psychologist and activist concerned with the plastic waste that contaminates the Colombian Amazon, invited me to give my point of view as an industrial designer on this problem.

As part of a group of creatives involved in this project, I could see that the pollution generated by the plastic bottles that we use every day is a problem that affects us on a global level. It was because of this that I decided to develop a project that would provide answers, from a design viewpoint, to this global issue.

The way we addressed this problem was to combine it with an ancient artisan resource: the textile tradition. Thus, my idea was to convert an object with a short and specific lifespan into a product enriched by the cosmogony of the local culture.

Colombia, thanks to its enormous cultural wealth, has been the perfect place to develop the first phase of this project.

Thanks to the advice of Artesanías de Colombia and to the patronage of Coca Cola, in August 2012 we returned to Bogotá, where we created a workshop of artesans from Cauca who had been displaced by guerilla war.

Seen from a distance, for its logical complexity, it seemed like an impossible task. However, a big part of the magic of this project has been to see how a puzzle of seemingly infinite pieces was put together until finally it was presented in the marketplace for the first time at the Milan Furniture Fair, 2013." Alvaro Catalan de  Ocon, Product Designer, PET Lamp