Studio Formafantasma Ore Streams

Studio Formafantasma turns scrap into a resource and confirms that design can play a crucial part in issues in which our planet’s future is at stake. 

- Angela Rui

In 2017 each person on the planet produced 30 per cent more electronic waste than in 2012, for a total of 64.4 million tonnes. Of this, 65 per cent was shipped illegally from the affluent world to developing countries for economic reuse.

However, the projections also offer some encouraging prospects. The growth in resource exploitation will eventually slow, largely because metals are scarce and the mining market is increasingly aware of this. And secondly, through cause and effect, because recycling will mean components and metals are returned into circulation and reused.

Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi (Studio Formafantasma) are guests of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne at the first Triennial of Art and Design, which opened last December (until 15.4.2018). Once again they prompt us to think that design can really play a crucial role in issues determining the future of the planet and our society. It can offer concrete alternatives not only in design, but also in human culture and its paradigms. Given that Australia is the only advanced country where metal mining is the mainstay of the economy, Studio Formafantasma spent two years developing Ore Streams, a research project that explores ways of using and disposing of e-waste, one of the most troublesome and least regulated activities in the world economy. If a metal typically remains in use for 30 years, the quantities of material now available for recycling are equivalent to what was produced 30 years ago. So, in the best-case scenario, if we adopt the proper disposal methods, it could prove possible to almost completely recycle what we have already mined.

In recent years the geological theme, and perhaps even more the geological time scale, has been a constant in the office’s research to develop a critical approach to the present. Whether they go back thousands of years (as in their projects De Natura Fossilium and