Brazil Recycled Art: Studio Swine's Mobile Foundry

Here is a design story that recently caught our attention. A London-based design studio called Studio Swine relocated to Brazil for several months and created housewares from discarded and recycled materials. One of the collections called 'Can City' involved creating a 'mobile forge' for smelting recycled aluminum right on the streets of Sao Paulo.

Recycling aluminum in Brazil is carried out (literally) by groups of organized scrap collectors known as Catadores who gather scrap aluminum and then sell it to local recycling centers. It appears that Studio Swine got hooked up with the Catadores to get the raw scrap aluminum for this project which was sponsored by Heineken beer.

A bit of back story: the name Studio Swine has nothing to do with pigs, it stands for 'Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Exploration' and it's world-renowned design collaborative made up Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves. Having read a few things about Studio Swine online, it looks like a common thread that runs through many of their projects is that they want to create beautifully designed pieces using recycled / cast off materials and they also want to create their tools from scrap (like their mobile forge made from scrap). For crafty types they've offered a few free designs from their website.

Sao Paulo Collection: Image credit Studio Swine