Pure Gold

Bulky trash, waste, cheap materials: pure gold! 

At least in the eyes of many active designers. PURE GOLD – UPCYCLED! UPGRADED! explores the subject of rubbish and presents approaches to using existing trash to create valuable products. 

Global industrialisation and ever greater levels of consumption make upcycling an urgent matter, and ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) is therefore addressing this issue in a design exhibition, a platform, workshops and conferences. The cornerstones of this project are ethics, responsibility, internationalisation and co-creation. 

The PURE GOLD exhibition consists of two complementary parts: the physical and material exhibition and the virtual platform as a space for dialogue, discussion and the storage of knowledge. 

The materials used in the presented examples are nearly all easily available anywhere and more or less “free” – and yet they are often seen as trash with little value. The same is true for the techniques used to rework them, the artisanal knowhow that in many cases is based on traditional methods and bears the stain of the backward. 

The aim of our exhibition is to disarm all the bad names that reuse has, and to achieve a new notion of raw materials and thus also a new appreciation of these products. 

Working with seven curators from Europe, Latin America, North Africa and the Near East, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, ifa has brought together 76 exhibits and a total of 53 designers for the exhibition, where they present added value and appreciation within many diverse contexts. 

The workshops that take place at the international touring exhibition venues with local designer and maker scenes offer results in the shape of instructables on the platform, as a further level for discussion and knowledge. Further information and materials on the workshop themes will be added. 

At every venue of the tour, ifa also invites local designers to show their works together with PURE GOLD.

ifa - Institute of Foreign Affairs

Much more than just an object of contemplation, art is a powerful tool for changing how something is perceived, overcoming established standards, and seeking new values.

This is the case with the exhibition "Pure Gold," presented by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, a thought-provoking collection of works that unites designers from different countries in a common universal reflection: humanity's relationship with nature.

Upcycling has gained traction worldwide by proposing different approaches to processing discarded materials and creating new, valuable products. In addition to raising awareness of alternative production techniques, we see examples of what can be done here.

It is no coincidence that, in addition to this exhibition, the MON is simultaneously holding other exhibitions that address the same issue. The reinterpretation is present in the adjacent rooms, both with the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora and the Brazilian artist Barrão, both artists with similar approaches to discussion.

Here, in dialogue with the Museum's permanent collection, seven design works from the collection are featured in the exhibition, offering visitors the opportunity for comparison. When displayed side by side, they reveal that there is no aesthetic or functional difference between those using conventional or recycled materials.

We understand that what has become urgent and urgent is not the presentation of magical solutions, but an invitation to reflect on the subject, through intimate and necessary reflection. As a living space for exchange, the museum allows each of us this moment, something made possible through art.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
Director-President of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

Pure Gold or: Why It Is Worthwhile to Sometimes Pay More Attention to Domestic Waste

“Bayern Munich are playing today in shirts made of rubbish.” This was a headline in the Bild newspaper in November 2016 for a pre-match report on the German football Bundesliga game between Bayern and 1899 Hoffenheim. Of course, this did not mean second-hand shirts from a collection of old clothes, but, as the report said, shirts made completely of “rubbish from the oceans” – “of 28 old plastic bottles that were fished out of the sea.” The report continued: “With these shirts, sports’ outfitter Adidas and the environmental campaigners Parley want to warn us about the pollution of the seas. Each year 20 million tons of plastic rubbish are thrown into the sea, and it takes a shocking 600 years for this to decompose.”1

 Even if this initiative was not motivated solely by concern for the environment, and Adidas probably will have had important marketing interests too, this use of resources is one example for the increasingly dynamic development of recycling technologies, and also for the high levels of acceptance of and appreciation for widely available recycled products. 

This was not always the case. It is not so long ago that the word recycling conjured up images of paper that had the colour of potato peelings, or shredded street surfaces, seen as quick fixes or a form of replacement material that should never be used wherever any aesthetic standards needed to be taken into account. This has now fundamentally changed. Nearly every day, we can read about new innovative products made entirely of “upcycled” plastic, old jeans, porcelain, rubber, and many other materials – presented not just in the business news, but also under the heading of “research and technology”. This means that the products discussed are not all semi-manufactured or basic products like toilet paper or bricks2, but also high-end articles in the furniture and textiles industries, products where both technical and aesthetic quality are decisive for commercial success. 

Prototypes for this strategy would include Philippe Starck’s Hudson Chair and Herman Miller’s Aeron Chair. These two chairs, and many more recycled products, are based on reusing materials that have been used before to make more or less the same kind of product, and that are first returned to their original state as mash, liquid, powder or fibre, even if they will again become chairs in their new shape and form. In terms of the production process, therefore, these products are not very different from tried and tested grey-brown recycled paper; and yet the modern textiles of a sports’ outfitter and the simple office-use stationery from a paper mill are in fact worlds apart. Aesthetic enhancement is one key development and difference. At the Cebit computer and technology fair in 2017, the Japanese company Epson presented a piece of equipment that worked with the so-called PaperLab process. The first step is to shred printed “old” paper, and then the shredded paper that this produces is transformed into new paper at the rate of 720 sheets per hour, with almost no need for water.3

It can be fairly assumed that it will not be long before decentrally operating machines like this Epson will be applied to other fields and technologies of production within domestic households. One example is 3D printers, which are now widely used. They can be fed with sorted and finely ground (in our own homes) household goods, and then perform whatever domestic needs are at hand, from making spare parts to small repairs. The necessary programming skills will not be a problem, as Generation Minecraft already has these today. 

But we have not yet come quite so far. At present, these recycling technologies are still used centrally or at least within the spheres of influence of the companies that make these goods (Adidas, Emeco, Herman Miller, Epson). This in turn means that access is relatively limited and usually quite expensive. Just how expensive the use of this kind of process can be and how that will influence end-user prices, is shown in the case of an attempt to use recycling to transform one of the most significant “environmental polluters” of recent decades into an environmentally friendly product. The company Original Food, based in Freiburg, Germany, wanted to produce compostable coffee capsules as an alternative to the Nespresso version with high aluminium content that has led to around 4,000 tons of capsule trash each year.4 This Original Food initiative sounds like a piece of good news, but the problem is that the price of the environmentally friendly capsule is 20 per cent higher than Nestlé’s product – and also lacks the clout of the “womanizer” George Clooney. Launching a new product could be simpler. 

Difficulties notwithstanding, these examples show that, given the right technological adaptations and equipment, change is possible, while current developments and increasing acceptance mean that sooner or later processes like these will transform the principle of reuse into one – if not the – standard in raw materials acquisition. 

It is true that political and financial programmes develop the greatest force of change in this field – and not the great ideas that designers have. In the examples of football shirts, furniture or coffee capsules made of recycled materials given here, the products are substitutes that look just like the “ecologically incorrect” products, with the exception of a hardly noticeable or invisible composition of materials. In other words, the success of these products is based only on a political and moral idea, or an economic or regulatory framework. 

This is very different in the case of products that rework used and worn relatively cheap objects from everyday life “as found” materials. These products do not return recycled objects by means of technical processes to their original material form so as to make another entirely “new” product. Instead they leave the found materials more or less as found – in their final and specific material and formal composition as a product. Even if this strategy does not perfectly match the definition of the German Waste Management Act5, or, put another way, does not correspond to our understanding of the recycling process, this form of reuse is nonetheless a very attractive alternative to the industrial “procurement of secondary materials” – at least from the perspective of design. 

It is the aim of the exhibition Pure Gold to show this. It presents a total of 76 examples by 53 designers from the regions of Europe, Latin America, North Africa and the Near East, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, and Southeast Asia, who have one clear thing in common. With varying degrees of perfection, all of these works are made either entirely by hand or with the help of just the simplest tools from used and worn materials – trash or the cheapest materials around. This means that expenditure on both equipment and operations is low. Works like those shown here can be made in the smallest workshops, within industrially more or less under-developed structures or independently at a private workbench. 

To summarize: reuse here is much less “fundamental” and thus much less complex. The added value of the used materials is only partially due to the purely material qualities of the original material. It is also due to the use of the physical, compositional, configured or just the aesthetic features of a deliberately selected or randomly found product. While industrial recycling aims to generate a quantity of products that are all as identical as possible (this is the only way to make a product like the Bayern football shirt), these “as found” strategies are primarily interested in using very specific known or hitherto neglected qualities such as formability, colour, firmness, haptics, or material structure and to add nuances in a new context. Sometimes this goes so far as to show the materials demonstratively while their original context and actual function can only be ascertained with a good deal of detective work. Probably no one would notice that Waltraud Münzhuber’s containers are nothing more than woven videotapes of various “favourite films.” And it would probably be just as difficult to see in Paul Cocksedge’s Styrene lamp a geometrically precise and yet relatively simple compilation of heat-reshaped polystyrene coffee cups. The origin of the Free Range stools by El Ultimo Grito is also not recognizable at first sight; these dented items are cleverly reshaped and compressed cardboard boxes. 

Above all, it is the diversity of the found materials that makes this source of materials into a realistic alternative to the energy intensive reuse of standard raw materials. Found materials can be papers of all kinds, corrugated card, glass, car tyres, cork, denim, builders’ wood, plastic baskets, wooden planks, wool, fridge coatings, plastic bags, flip-flops, sticky and PVC tape, steel offcuts, cheap bags, and much more. If we add the characteristic attributes to this list of materials – it is after all the physical and aesthetic features that speak for and against the use of a material – then we can get a rough idea of the immense imaginative scope that this nearly inexhaustible stock of alleged trash holds for contemporary and future design. 

Of course this form of design and production is not really new. It has similarities with the principle of the ready-made in the fine arts and with the adhocism propagated by Charles Jencks in the early 1970s6, or with various aspects of the DIY movements from the 1960s to today, or the drop-out practices of the hippies in the 1960s and 1970s. 

We can also recall here how articles of daily use are improvised in times of scarcity, originating from a completely different situation, but made and used with the same impulse and design principles as the works shown in this exhibition.7 

In contrast to these “movements,” however (perhaps with the exception of objects of use made out of need and necessity), today’s development in design-motivated recycling (or recycling-motivated design) on show in this exhibition has no missionary urgency and comes with no abstract and idealistic ideology. Instead, these works derive from a mix of curiosity and imagination, an analytical perspective and often incredible patience, combined with crafts skills and a solid knowledge of the “raw materials” used. It is probably exactly this combination of very sober skill and artistic talent that has enabled this phenomenon in design to spread all around the world. This also means that these manually made and “improvised” works are no less significant than technologies developed for mass production and serial recycling. 

For sure, in view of the 320,000 paper coffee cups discarded per hour (!) in Germany alone8, the importance of industrially managed recycling cannot be overemphasized. This is also true of the fact that manual production can simply and easily be carried out with the simplest of tools, and can lead to outstanding results, as this exhibition shows. The quality is not just in the design, but with the right handicrafts, also monetary. 

The designer Stuart Haygarth holds an undisputed top place in this respect.9 The Drop chandelier he designed in 2007 is made of hundreds of different carefully cleaned plastic bottle bases rearranged in a form resembling drops of water as the product’s key design idea. The production and material both show that this product could be made anywhere in the world, only if enough plastic bottles are available – but these are washed up on our shores everywhere. 

The only reason why this classic example of exceptional upcycling cannot be included in this exhibition is its price of several thousand pounds sterling. This shows that we are not all that far away from the value of gold that the title of this exhibition suggests, particularly when we take a closer look at all the trash around us.

Volker Albus
Curator

1 Bild, 5 November 2016, p. 1, p. 14.

2 See Neue Zürcher Zeitung, international edition, 22 February 2017, pp. 38/39.

3 See Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 March 2017, p. 19.

4 See Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 19 March 2017, p. 24.

5 “Recycling“ is defined as “any process of use that processes waste products into products or materials to be used either for their original purpose or for other purposes. This includes the use and processing of organic materials that are to be used as fuel or for back-filling” (§ 3 subsection 25, German Waste Management Act).

6 Charles Jencks, Nathan Silver, Adhocism, New York, 1973.

7 See Werkbund-Archiv, Blasse Dinge, Werkbund und Waren 1945 – 1949. Eine Ausstellung des Werkbund-Archivs im Martin-Gropius-Bau vom 12.8. – 8.10.1989, exhibition magazine, Berlin, no year.

8 The number 320,000 is taken from Barbara Kuchler, “Über die Verhältnisse der anderen Leben,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 November 2016.

9 Stuart Haygarth, www.stuarthaygarth.com/

Upcycling in Latin America: A Long Tradition

Reusing cheap materials or garbage to create new objects and extending their life cycle has been part of Latin American material culture for a long time. Whereas in parts of the world like Europe this practice derives from environmental awareness, in these countries it derives from an inventiveness dictated by a need for survival. Poverty historically created vast population clusters marginalized from consumer society. Lack of access to industrially manufactured goods prompted people to use their own hands to create and make objects aimed at satisfying their everyday needs.

In Brazil, up to the 1970s, the population was predominantly rural. Creating objects for family or community use was based on natural local elements as raw materials. Straw would become baskets to carry supplies, woven hammocks to sleep in or the roofs of homes; clay would be transformed into vessels to store water and into plates to eat from; tree branches and trunks combined with leather from animals would result in items of furniture. In the country dubbed as the one with the greatest biodiversity in the world, there is no shortage of raw materials to supply the different requirements of resistance, lightness, durability, and adaptability to the local climate in various typologies of objects.

With growing urbanization, materials derived from industrial society’s leftovers were added to naturally available materials. The garbage of the wealthiest became raw materials for the population brackets at the base of the pyramid. Thus, reusing leftovers, as “infected” as they might seem, became an everyday practice. Another frequent attitude was to dislocate objects from the functions they were primarily made to serve and adapt them to new functions.

The Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), who came to Brazil in the 1940s and stayed until the end of her days, admiringly documented these practices, which she came to know in the late 1950s when she started to work in Bahia state, in the northeastern region of the country, poorer than industrialized São Paulo, where she had been living up to then. Lina fell in love with quilts made from small fabric scraps and with utensils created through reusing various aluminium packaging. Paradigmatic objects she collected during her wanderings were kerosene lamps used to light homes with no electric power supply, made of garbage – ironically, some of them used discarded burnt-out bulbs as the container for the combustible fluid.

Another intellectual who was deeply interested in such practices was designer Aloísio Magalhães (1927–1982). In the 1970s, he created the Centro Nacional de Referência Cultural (National Centre of Cultural Reference), which documented local efforts. Aloísio was motivated by a question from the then Brazilian minister of Industry and Commerce Severo Gomes, who asked why Brazilian products did not have their own character. According to the designer, this was due to unfamiliarity with Brazilian material culture. As head of the Centre, Aloísio conducted research on textiles, ceramics production, beverage labels, budget brands, indigenous crafts, and the recycling of industrial leftovers, among other themes, all carried out in order to explore the character of Brazilian products and designs.

The Centre was a public institution trying to question the function-oriented quality dominating institutionalized Brazilian design at the time, which was due to the great influence of the German Ulm School of Design model on the first design school established in Brazil – Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI; Higher Education School of Industrial Design), founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1963. ESDI’s programme followed that of the Ulm School, from where some of the professors came. Adoption of this international style had become a prevailing power not only at ESDI, but also at schools opened later and in the everyday activities of designers.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, echoes of concerns regarding “recycling in design” started to reach Brazil, coming particularly from Europe, along with environmental initiatives against exaggerated consumerism and a sense of anxiety about having more and more stuff based on a Western way of life. Expressions such as “Kleenex culture” came to critically represent this mentality, as did “use and discard”. Those movements started to question the very use of the expression “to discard”. After all, what is really discarded? If it is no longer at home, it is still part of the town, of the country – and ultimately – of the world. Cargo ships transport compacted waste from highly industrialized countries to far-away places in the southern hemisphere, trying to “discard” their filth. However, this will continue to be “within” the planet. We needed to start to look at waste as the only resource growing on the planet, as the American thinker Buckminster Fuller foretold.

Those international echoes came to Latin America, ironically at a time when many countries in the region – Brazil included – were going through great economic booms, weakening the population‘s recycling efforts. Thus, through international environmental movements fuelled by a growing environmental crisis, reuse initiatives gained new meaning – now as positioning statements, and almost like an ideological manifesto for the planet’s future.

The ideas of some branches of design in the northern hemisphere also influenced Latin America, expressed, for instance, in the Conscious, Simple – Consciously Simple exhibition curated by Volker Albus and completed in 1998 by ifa, which later, in May 1999, came to Museu da Casa Brasileira in São Paulo. Albus showed an alternative culture of products conceived, produced and handled in a consciously simple way, which represented a shock to Brazilian ears used to the Ulm School’s industrial pragmatism.¹

In November of the same year, at the Novos alquimistas (New Alchemists) exhibition at Itaú Cultural, I gathered objects resulting from cheap materials or garbage upcycling. In the same exhibition space, vernacular creations by people with no formal instruction from around the country stood side by side with the work of educated designers who sought inspiration both in Brazilian traditional culture and in new ideas emerging from discussions in the northern hemisphere. Many designers taking part in the show referred to their grandparents as “recycling masters”, people capable of reusing everything, of transforming waste into gold.

As I noted in the catalogue, “recycling, reusing, recontextualizing became part of our everyday lives, and not only in the realm of objects. Graphic design changed with image scanning and distortion made possible through a computer. In fashion, from the grunge movement as inspiration, also to haute couture, it came to the streets. Samplers are very present in the universe of pop, and other music movements take advantage of reusing elements of traditional local culture and of other worlds. The dictatorship of ‘good taste’ no longer exists, in any domain. Recirculation of information, forms, and sound marks our everyday lives. In the field of objects, it does not matter what the nuances of each different country are, there is a common questioning of the type of progress adopted by industrial society.”²

Latin American designers now selected for Pure Gold reveal their dual influence of internal vernacular design and of social movements influencing international design. Brunno Jahara and Domingos Tótora from Brazil and Colectivo Ático de Diseño from Argentina are relatively new protagonists on the scene, and even though they share similar views regarding design today, each of them chooses different procedures.

Domingos Tótora starts by designing his raw materials himself, developed from discarded cardboard packaging. This is not simple reuse, as a whole new process is involved in the transformation of the material. Cardboard is mixed with water and glue, and then pressed and moulded, acquiring resistance. Only later will it gain the forms imagined by the designer.

The path of Brunno Jahara is the recontextualization of very cheap pieces in plastic or clay, industrially manufactured in large series. In that process of dislocation and regrouping, he generates new uses and, particularly, new meanings. These are ready-made objects.

Curator Luján Cambariere, on the other hand, in her Colectivo Ático de Diseño, starts with antiquities and invites designers to recreate the pieces, inserting them into new repertoires.

None of these three designers hide the genesis of their objects, but they do not make them overly evident either. Their objects do not intend to be manifestoes or statements; they are not loud. All of them display great ability to transform their environment through economical methods and resources. Further, they display inventiveness and an ability to offer solutions, even when they are far from ideal conditions and far from technological sophistication. Form transcends function so that it can incorporate different functionalities. Jahara and Ático de Diseño manage resources like humour and irony well, while Tótora chooses very clear silent poetry.

All these objects invite us, as consumers, to combine consumption and community living with the pleasure of aesthetic joy and a desire for a better world.

Adélia Borges
Curator | Latin American Region | São Paulo, Brazil.

1 Conscious, Simple – Consciously Simple. The Emergence of an Alternative Product Culture, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), Stuttgart 1998.

2 “Novos alquimistas,” in Consumo Cotidiano/Arte, São Paulo, Itaú Cultural, 1999.

The Goethe-Institut is the international cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany. Since its founding in Germany in 1951, its mission has been to foster cultural exchange, education, and social discourse in the international context, as well as to support the teaching and learning of the German language in dialogue with the world, promoting diversity, understanding, and trust, encouraging access to the German language, and supporting the free development of culture and science. The institution believes in the potential of international cultural exchange, nurtured and strengthened by connections between artists, activists, academic thinkers, researchers, creative minds, and institutional partnerships. In this context, the Goethe-Institut reaffirms its commitment to the UN 2030 Agenda action plans, promoting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals through cultural, educational, and environmental initiatives that encourage equity, diversity, and global sustainability.

Around 20,000 cultural events take place worldwide each year in cooperation with partners. Through residency programs, collaborations, and co-productions, the institute fosters the creation of global networks among cultural professionals.

Today, the Goethe-Institut São Paulo develops and supports a broad spectrum of cultural events, disseminating and updating local themes present in the contemporary German scene, in addition to mapping the most pressing issues in Brazil through its projects.

"PURE GOLD – UPCYCLED! UPGRADED!" is an exhibition by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V. (ifa) in cooperation with the Oscar Niemeyer Museum and the Goethe-Institut São Paulo.

Upcycling is the practice that best represents the alliance of contemporary design with a growing ecological awareness. Unlike traditional recycling, upcycling transforms discarded or unused materials into products of greater value, both functionally and aesthetically. It is a creative way to give new life to objects that would otherwise be considered trash, promoting conscious consumption, originality, and environmental responsibility. In the world of design, upcycling not only reduces environmental impact but also inspires unique solutions with their own stories and identity. Previously discarded materials take on new forms, bearing the marks of time and their own narrative. This practice allows the designer-creator to explore contrasts, textures, and unique symbolism, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. The result is signature pieces, full of personality, that break with conventional aesthetic standards and provoke reflection on consumption, disposal, memory, and meaning.

We hope the exhibition inspires new ways of making, combined with a concern for environmental impact.

“The selected items from the Oscar Niemeyer Museum’s collection are rooted in a more or less traditional design philosophy.

That is precisely why they were placed in dialogue with the collection of upcycled furniture pieces.

By presenting the two design approaches side by side, visitors can perceive that there is no significant formal or stylistic difference between using conventional materials — such as wood, plastic, or leather — and working with ‘used’ or recycled materials.

This deliberate juxtaposition aims to encourage a deeper understanding and appreciation of the aesthetics behind the PURE GOLD items.”

Volker Albus
Curator