Hi everyone! This week we would like to present you a new section from our blog. It’s purpose is to raise awareness about projects from other professionals which, like Jinja, care about having a sustainable life and dedicate your work to the respect of environment, by their creative process or through the use of recycled or biodegradable materials.

In this first post, we want to talk about Lithuanian designer Austeja Platukyte, whose work we had the pleasure to know through instagram and have following since then because their exciting experiences in creating new materials.
Austeja cares about ecologic problems, so her currently research are based on the transformation of  “today’s waste into tomorrow’s raw materials”, as you can read on her website, giving new shapes to this materials, and adopting them to contemporany art and product design, creating “new value for the future and contributing to a more sustainable world”.

photo by @Mattias Pettersson

The designer, currently doing a design Phd at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania, was recently in a artistic residence and scholarship program at Sliperiet, Research and Innovation Centre at Umea Art Campus, Sweden. The work she developed there is called “Black Matter”, a curious experimental project with recycled natural textiles and cellulose based biodegradable materials.

photo by @Mattias Pettersson

As explained by the designer, in “the textile recycling process I used only organic fabrics, like cotton, to create cellulose-based bioplastic. After that I’m mixing that cellulose-based bioplastic with other cellulosic materials like charcoal, leaves, tree bark and others, to make new objects full cellulose-based. In other words, all materials have the same chemical formula for easy degradation and recycling.”
The final result are hard object, like mirrors, stool or lamps, very sculptural that reflects the flexible matter from which were created.

photo by @Mattias Pettersson

Surely we will continue pay attention to this designer and waiting for her new experiences!