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Studio Swine (Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Exploration--website ) is a collaboration between Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves. Here's how they describe their "Can City" project from Behance, a platform to share creative work with fellow-artists and with the public.
Studio Swine has made a mobile foundry that smelts aluminum cans using waste vegetable oil collected from local cafes as a fuel. Waste collectors known as Catadores mine the streets for materials to produce a furniture series with vernacular aesthetic, providing a portrait of the streets.
The Can Stools are made simply with sand casting technique using readily available construction sand from local building sites, and by casting an assemblage of objects found on the streets. The furnace and the tools are made with salvaged materials and a scrap beer barrel.
Can City suggests a future possibility where Catadores (waste collectors) can adopt this system to make use of free metal and free fuel to produce an infinite range of individually crafted aluminum items.
According to architect and sociologist Teodora Zapartan (twitter), writing at Inspiratonist, Studio Swine emphasizes not only sustainability, but aesthetics, believing that "desire is the greatest agent of change."
Photo from Behance.
According to Eoghan Macguire and Sofia Fernandes writing for CNN, Business Commitment for Recycling (CEMPRE) estimated in 2010 that there were roughly one million catadores in Brazil
Many are the formerly homeless, ex-convicts or individuals who have stumbled upon hard times, selling what they find to recycling companies.
Waste Land (movie website) told the story of Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz’s collaboration with catadores who mined the world's largest dump outside Rio. "Can City" is the next installment of collaboration. Any artists in our region want to start up a similar project for economic development in Appalachia?
