Food waste

Bio-innovation: Materials Languages

Material languages is an artistic research project around materials that shows a huge range of possibilities and qualities of a material manufactured at a home lab.

From different organic waste collected from own consumption, and neighbouring premises, a natural drying process is carried out, selection and processing to convert this discard into useful matter, giving it a new use and a new meaning.

'Material Languages' proposes an approach to possible solutions surrounding the problems of single-use plastic. In addition to proposing new aesthetics from the construction of new scenarios and imaginary futures, which combine ancestral knowledge, practical knowledge and public and private speculative.

Samples were made taking into account hardness, fragility, flexibility, transparency, density and errors to create a playful catalogue expressing these qualities in the registers. The manufacturing process started with base recipes, using materials such as gelatine, starches and algae, and organic material such as eggshells, banana skins, turmeric, onion skins, and potato skins. From this material, a process of drying and crushing is carried out to pass to the manufacturer by means of a recipe as in the traditional kitchen. It is left to dry while observing its transformations.

Both pigments and natural dyes were used to give colour, using natural materials such as turmeric, onion skins, red cabbage, avocado skin, annatto seed and others have been used. The dyes were made from husks that were also used for the production of the biomaterial, reducing waste as much as possible and incorporating all the material into the process. On the basis of this research, the development of a 'bio-colour palette' based on natural pigments applied to different biomaterials is under development.

Ocloya Studio's artistic and multidisciplinary study emphasises new ideas, languages and possible solutions for the textile and fashion present that involves thinking about the past at the same time as the future.

Making process

Starting from the research of each characteristic, she started experimenting with base recipes, playing with the given colour or varying it in the same manufacturing process by combining ingredients or modifying the pH of the dye.

Text submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank. For information about reproducing (a part of) this text, please contact the maker.