The Art of Recycling

While visiting the street fair in Recoleta, Buenos Aires, a must go for anyone (tourist or not) interested in seeing local and very unusual arts and crafts, we both fall in love with the work of a young guy that builds "darky" characters by recycling mostly electronics.

Somewhere in the middle between the aesthetics of Tim Burton, Mad Max and Waterworld, his small and not so small creatures can be at the same time cute and creepy (but way more cool than anything else).

With names like Pr. Dirk, Dr. Zil, HIB or Mr. Lag, each character has a clear "personality" so when you see the whole bunch is almost like observing a tribe from a near future... they are all related in some way but still separate entities.

The artist himself looks a bit like Edward Scissorhands and with a similar nice attitude he explained to us that most of his creatures are made with electronic parts. His intention is to recycle as much as possible, so parts of computers, cellphones and other small electronic devices is his basic raw material.

We bought a couple of small figurines for us, but we also took a lot of pictures to share his art. First, the artist himself with one of his biggest creatures, followed by some close ups of his creatures, from menacing doctors to "fly type" little men...

He wasn't the only craft artist using recycled materials and there was a noticeable shift among artists to transform "waste" into useful or decorative objects.

It may be related to some growing "green conscious" among the craft artists or simply because with more and more discarded parts out there those parts allow them to work with a smaller budget and create things that -at the end-, do have a bigger value considering the time and (in most cases) the nice designs they come up with.

One reason or the other, it is great to see that someone is actually recycling electronics, in a city that -I have to admit it-, is not very proactive when it comes to waste management.