tota reciclados / recycled jewelry

TOTA RECICLADOS

Valeria Hasse & Marcela Muñiz

The Argentinian duo Tota Reciclados consists of designers Valeria Hasse (1963) and Marcela Muñiz (1959). Valeria Hasse was trained as a graphic designer at the University of Buenos Aires. After that, she followed a postgraduate course at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (2000). Marcela Muñiz is an architect who also studied at the University of Buenos Aires. She was Artist in Residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany in 2005. Hasse and Muñiz are based in Buenos Aires but travel all over the world with their projects and workshops. Their work is part of several private collections, the collection of CODA Museum in Apeldoorn, Netherlands and the collection of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway. Tota Reciclados were selected as Artists in Residence by the Françoise van den Bosch Foundation in 2013. During their stay in Studio Rian de Jong in Amsterdam they developed Broken Memories, Precarious Links, creating a new jewellery collection with its own story, made up of old materials and existing stories and memories. The concluding exhibition with the same title was staged in CODA Museum from 21 September 2014 to 11 January 2015.

Tota reciclados started developing an experimental project based in recycling discarded material in the beginning of 2002.

This project begun out of the interest of designing and creating new objects from collected, inherited and found objects, in the context of a huge economical crisis in Argentina in December 2001. Working only with material available in the surroundings became the starting point of the creative process, using discarded things to comment on the cultural world where we come from. We reuse materials and objects trying to emphasize the mixture, in order to create jewels to be worn.

Instead of traditional jewelry techniques we work assembling different elements using wire and threads, closer to the idea of provisory rather than eternal. We like to feel that the objects we recover are not trapped in a new “prison”, somehow they have “freedom”: they can move and they can be recycled again.

We collect and group found items in order to refabricate objects into something new. "Precarious” versus “precious”: the tension created between these two concepts is always present in our work; we try to make it visible since we never hide when an object is worn or deteriorated, nor try to fix it or look “perfect”.

For us, anything can be an object for collecting. Classification, as a form of logical restriction, is the starting point of our work. We classify to place things in order, to establish a control over them. Our atelier is a world full of boxes divided into formal categories: shapes, colors, materials; but sometimes we need to create new categories using our intuition: “super kitsch”, “grandmother’s”, “small hands”, “babies”, “so beautiful that intimidates”…

Recycling for us involves notions of assembling, recombining, including chance, serendipity, mistakes, failures, improvisation, fragmentary and hybrid. Each piece is at the same time unique and multiple, solid and open for different uses and meanings.

We try to find new connections and meanings when we construct a new piece: the found objects start to talk to each other. For us, this process of recombining and recontextualizing objects, images and ideas is a metaphor for the way in which meaning is constructed nowadays. We enjoy making jewelry pieces also to produce the desire of wearing them. The relationship between the piece and the wearer show us how jewelry can reflect the changes of our time.