AN INSTALLATION BY ARCHITECT NICCOLO CASAS IN COLLABORATION WITH THE ITALIAN PAVILION

New York, 26 April 2021 - Parley for the Oceans is delighted to present Plasticity, an installation by Italian architect Niccolo Casas in collaboration with the Italian Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia.

Plasticity is a 3.6-metre high sculpture, 3D-printed by innovative design brand Nagami and fabricated with Parley Ocean Plastic®, a premium material created from upcycled plastic waste recovered from remote islands, waters and coastlines by Parley’s Global Cleanup Network.

Conceived and designed by Niccolo Casas, the installation will form part of ‘Resilient Communities’, this year’s theme of la Biennale di Venezia’s Italian Pavilion curated by architect and academic Alessandro Melis. The curator has invited architects to reflect and speculate on radical strategies for resilient communities in a call to take action on climate change. Plasticity is Niccolo Casas’ response to the brief and embodies the expression of a radical vision for a new, eco-innovative architecture.

The term ‘Plasticity’ comes from the syncretism of ‘plastic’ and ‘sustainability’. It refers to projects and initiatives related to the re-use and conversion of ready-made plastics. Plasticity intends to highlight the notions of transformation and conversion; it is in fact the scientific property of a material to deform, undergoing permanent twists, acquiring new forms and properties. In architecture, as in art, the term refers to the quality of a work to freely articulate in space. Plasticity could be interpreted as the capability of a material to transform itself by acquiring new characteristics and dimensions through a process of identity redefinition.

With Plasticity, Casas and Parley for the Oceans together with Nagami’s innovative techniques, demonstrate that harmful plastics can be transformed into a useful material and, in this case, into a lightweight and complex architectural sculpture, through the implementation of digital technologies. The installation is a statement of the unlimited possibilities for generating new spatial articulations as well as instigating ecologically meaningful actions.

‘In order to have a true impact on the redefinition of future inhabitation, architecture must reinvent itself as a new discipline focusing on the construction of collaborative environments. Architecture, both in academia and in the profession, must strategically get in contact with the knowledge of boundaries that has been underestimated or even ignored until now. Together with Parley for the Oceans and Nagami, we are committed to a joint effort with the aim of showing a vision of how architecture can be designed and built in the future but in particular, of how architecture can become an instigator and activator of circular economy. Plasticity is the avant-garde architectural example of what can be done with intercepted plastics from ocean cleaning activities’ says Niccolo Casas, Principal and Founder of multi-disciplinary practice Niccolo Casas Architecture.

Parley works to accelerate solutions to marine plastic pollution, climate change and overfishing with operations in over 30 countries. Through collaborative cleanups with local businesses and organisations, teams intercept plastic waste from beaches, remote islands, rivers, mangroves and coastal communities.