Salvaged Bicycle Chain Chandeliers by Carolina Fontoura Alzaga

Multidisciplinary artist Carolina Fontoura Alzaga has created Connect, a delightful series of chandeliers made of salvaged bicycle parts. She has them available to purchase at her Etsy shop, Facaro, and was recently featured on The Etsy Blog. Etsy created this short film about Carolina and her art titled Handmade Portraits: Chain Reaction.

…This developing body of work draws inspiration from the aesthetics of victorian era chandeliers, DIY and Bike Culture, and follows an art tradition of utilizing non artistic materials for sculpture.

This series addresses class codes, power dynamics, reclaimed agency, and ecological responsibility. The traditional chandelier is seen as a bourgeois commodity, a cachet of affluence, excess, and as such power. The recycled bicycle parts become a representation of the dismissed, invisible, and powerless, but are also an affirmation of self-propelled movement. The bicycle chandelier thereby creates a new third meaning of reclaimed agency.

These Subversive objects challenge the aesthetics of wealth by visually contrasting the classic elegance of the candelabrum with the newfound elegance of discarded, mechanical bicycle parts. Also, as objects made from existing materials they challenge the necessity of the new.

CONNECT is a metaphor of potentiality in collectivity. It imagines what is possible with each unique chandelier form.

via The Etsy Blog