Adital Ela
15. Oktober 2016The first expert of the ECO DESIGN FORUM in Israel and Palestine we want to present to you is María Paz Montecinos. She is based out of Spain and will give us great insights into sustainable design in Barcelona. At the moment she is working for Drap Art designing the graphic and audiovisual material for the festival.
She also does workshops incorporating new technologies, transforming city waste into raw material for designers / artists to create their works, which are to be produced in 3D printers. You can read more about this project below.
Profile
Maria Paz was born in Santiago de Chile and is an art director and cultural manager. She studied in Barcelona, Spain, where she presently resides.
She has gained a lot of experience in projects in development cooperation and has worked in projects in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, United Nations, Unicef, UNDP and the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank), among others.
She has participated in diverse art projects and projects dealing with environmental sustainability, such as Drap Art in Barcelona, Arte Cien in Latin America and the Re:NEW Festival in Pittsburgh, U.S.A.
She works in research and creative projects that are focused on the observation and reflection of territory from a landscape perspective together with the historical and social contexts in order to create an artistic exchange between artists in different parts of the world.
The main focus of her work covers culture as a tool for intervention and social transformation, working on artistic projects that are accessible to everyone, for example in public spaces or bringing projects to extreme geographical areas where access to culture is limited.
Drap-Art
Drap-Art is a platform for artists who work with recycled materials. It is also an awareness raising campaign to inform the general public about the use of waste as a resource and about more responsible and sustainable consumer behavior.
Drap-Art’s general acceptance is increasing because people have started to worry about environmental issues and they feel understood in their concerns when they see artists working in this field. It is also something fun to recognise objects that had a specific use for which they are no longer suited and which you would normally throw away, transformed into something else, for instance designer objects or jewelry.
Imagination is the first creating force; without it there would be nothing. So I say that artists have a lot of imagination.
Association
Drap-Art is an association of artists who have chosen trash to be their material and/or conceptual resource. Drap-Art promotes a new trend in visual art that has its origins in the movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as Arts and Crafts or William Morris. In Catalonia these ideas were promoted by artists such as Santiago Rusiñol and Ramon Casas. One of their utopias imagined a world without large concentrations of power, but distributed in small economic units, in which human beings, with their creativity fully developed, worked independently in their workshops, both in free creations and commissioned works, designer objects or hand crafted products.
Activities
The label Drap-Art is doing a handful activities to fulfill the idea of the association. Drap-Art’16 arrives at its 14th edition and celebrates 20 years organizing festivals. The event will be developed as usual in eight modalities that show us the possibilities of creative recycling: group exhibitions of art and designer objects made from recyclable materials, interventions in public space, a space for thought and discussion, participative workshops, performances, audiovisuals and environmental cinema, but it will substitute its traditional Xmas Fair with a weekend of live creation, in memory of its first festival the Maraton of Art & Recycling in Barcelona. The festival also takes place in Uruguay and the Pittsburgh, USA.
Place
Drap-Art’s headquarters is a studio in Barcelona. It is the centre of operations of the association and the International Festival of Recycling Art of Catalonia. The studio is an exhibition space, specialised in recycled art, where four exhibitions are shown every year and where the artworks of Drap-Art’s members are also on permanent display. It also hosts art, design and crafts from all over the world, created from waste materials. Furthermore, workshops are offered at the space and it also has a documentation centre, provided with literature about Art Brut, and recycled art, the social history of trash and other related topics.
