When charity director Danielle Smith met students and lecturers from the London Metropolitan Art Media & Design in 2007, she did not imagine how creative and fruitful this collaboration would be: French student Florie Salnot developed a unique craft technique using hot sand and plastic bottles and taught it to twenty-one Saharawi women to re-discover an ancient tradition of creative expression of their cultural identity.
The London Metropolitan Art Media & Design Suite invited Danielle in 2007 to meet their students and to offer their cross-disciplinary MA programme as “a research and aid platform for non-developed regions and sectors”.
Danielle approached the students with a simple brief: “Develop design solutions from which the Saharawi refugees can benefit from”. Sharing the common belief that “culture [is] a reviver and a generator”, Sandblast and the London Met worked together to develop a workshop that would involve Saharawi women to craft jewellery from resources available to them in the camps.
For Waste to become Fashion
Funded by the Saharawi Artist Fund {link}, French postgraduate student Florie Salnot developed a craft technique to be taught and implemented with a workshop for Saharawi women as part of her MA design project. Her aim was “to design a way to empower the Saharawis to produce some objects by utilizing the resources available in the camps”.
In April 2009, she travelled with Sandblast to the Saharawi refugee camps in South West Algeria. Instead of clothes and sun lotion, Florie however packed materials like glue, cutters, nails and wooden frames. She would not go on holidays but invite a group of Saharawi women to join her making jewellery out of sand and plastic bottles.
Aim
To encourage the Saharawis to express themselves, their culture and identity that have been at risk by years of exile and conflict;
to empower the Saharawis economically in order to become less dependent on humanitarian help;
to teach the Saharawis a technique that gives them a means of expressing through jewellery-making, an ancient tradition that had been forgotten as a result of the conditions of exile; and
to promote their dignity through paid and creative work, design becoming a factor of social cohesion and offers cultural stimuli.
Technique
Florie developed for this jewellery-making project a technique to recycle discarded plastic bottles and hot sand – both available at plenty in the refugee camps. She brought along wooden frames and nails to create nail boards for various designs.
To make the jewellery, the Saharawi women learned how:
to nail shapes and forms on the wooden boards;
to make colourful threads of plastic bottles by softening the plastic with hot sand;
to stretch and twist strips of the plastic bottle around the nails to shape into the design;
to submerge the nail board with the plastic strips into a pan of hot sand; and
to take off the fixed shape to assemble it with silver caps to make jewellery.
Jewellery-making Workshop
The workshop in April 2009 were held in the refugee camp Dakhla for two groups of women (21 in total) over a three-day period. With only limited time available to them, the women often took pieces home to finish them. Producing necklaces, rings, bracelets, earrings and brooches as Florie showed them, the Saharawis soon invented their own shapes and combined colours to make unique pieces of jewellery, reflecting their personal identity and the Saharawi culture. The jewellery will be sold to generate a source of income for the Saharawis both on an internal camp market and international market.
Florie reported that “the women very quickly became familiar with the technique and worked with passion and intensity”. One day, one of the pieces was missing and was suspected to be stolen. Florie was very upset and angry. To her surprise, the Saharawi women were not; they laughed. When she asked why they were laughing, they explained that they were happy to see how their work was so much appreciated that it was worth to be stolen.
Hoping to ensure that more women can continue benefiting and producing jewellery on a regular basis, Florie left tools and metal fittings with the Saharawis to produce about 100 more finely finished pieces. Sandblast is looking into ways it can help motivated and talented women develop business and marketing skills and provide them with small loans to buy the metal fittings for the jewellery pieces. Part of the income obtained from selling the pieces would then be used to pay back the loan and the rest to purchase more materials to continue producing jewellery.
About the Artist
Florie Salnot is a French MA student and fashion artist.
She did a postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Arts when she decided to do a design project in the Saharawi refugee camps by producing jewellery with little resources but greatly empowering consequences. When Florie met Danielle, she was in her last year of an undergraduate degree in product design.
With a background in Social Science, she is passionate to relate design and social issues, asking the question: “How can design be applied to go beyond aesthetics or technical innovation and help to solve social problems”. She has a strong interest in experimenting with materials to discover new properties or new uses.
If you want to get in touch with her, visit her blog.
