Spain’s unemployment rate has reached 23% which has many employed Spaniards in manufacturing looking for cheap materials. Designer Raul Lauri of Ibi, Spain is pressing coffee grounds into lamps the size and shape of cute earless coffee mugs. Lauri’s patent pending design for the Decafé Lamp, won first prize at this year’s Salone Satellite in Milan.
Lauri’s town of Ibi is famous for its 200-year-old annual festival, Els Enfarinats, where ordinary people don military garb and stage a mock coup d’état – chastising local dignitaries (in a good humored-way) and imposing fines on shopkeepers and bankers. Anyone who opposes is assaulted (or celebrated) with flour bombs and eggs. If unemployment climbs any higher however, that good humor should give way and mock may not describe the coup. Flour and eggs may not fuel the bombs either. Even Lauri the lampmaker might think: uh-oh, light’s out.
