The man from Guayaquil was selected from among more than 1,500 applicants from 65 countries around the world.
The Ecuadorian designer Alfredo RamirezThe 27-year-old is one of the 100 winners of the Prince Claus Seed Awards, which are awarded by the Prince Claus Fund, which is based in Amsterdam.
Winners were selected from more than 1,500 applicants, from 65 countries from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Three categories were awarded: seed, mentorship e impact, which “are designed to support artists and practitioners of culture in different ways at crucial stages of their professional careers.”
“For me receiving this award means feeling that I am on the right track, that (my) ideas … make senseThey have relevant spaces with what happens in the world. So, it’s super motivating for me from that perspective, “says the Guayaquil native, who won in the category seed.
According to Ramírez, the Prince Claus Fund awards the award “for the track record and the type of work that has been done …”. “In general, my practice of design, art, etc., has always had to do with looking for unconventional research environments, looking for forms of playful recreation, finding synergies between the recovery of art materials, design to find symbiotic strategies for survive … ”, he explains.
It comes from a family of metallurgists and mechanics. Last year he completed his Master’s in Expanded Design Practices at Goldsmiths at the University of London. “The objective of the race was to explore the possibilities of what design can do beyond studying the technical aspects …”, he explains.
During his master’s degree he carried out a project “that probably put me on this path,” he says, adding that he developed it with a group of waste pickers from the neighborhood where he lived while he was doing his master’s, southeast London.
“What I did was to develop a series of workshops where I had taken them different species of fungi and explained to them how they live in nature, what are the strategies they do to survive … The idea was how to see these species and take a lot of the objects that they had and that were already on the verge of being discarded to disassemble and rebuild them … and from that we made a series of sculptures … “, he says.
Another project that he joined when he was completing his master’s degree was Making Futures Bauhaust +, in Berlin. “It was a residence in an abandoned building in what was the center of East Berlin. It was like an action research project, which sought to find new forms of architecture … And specifically what I did inside that residence was to begin to understand the building … what kind of waste we generated, what kind of impact we had on this space and then with what type of infrastructure we interacted … The challenge was, I had to tell how much we could recycle, reuse in that space with these basic tools, “he says.
He currently leads the MOLTN project, which comes from molten, which means ‘melted’ in English. A space found in Durán. “We are developing this space to experiment with sustainable manufacturing. What we are doing is developing methods and processes to work, for now, mainly with plastics, which have already been used, which have reached their useful life, and transform them into something new. But the idea is that they are things that have high value and that they are things that have a longer useful life … ”, he explains.
“The idea of this is that it be a platform for various artists and designers and people from all branches to approach and work with this material …”, says Ramírez, who while working “for an NGO in Guayaquil implemented resolution programs of problems oriented to the design for high school students with the objective that they could address problematic situations of their communities ”. (I)
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