For yet another year, students from the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture have taken part in the Llum BCN Festival, which has been organised by the Barcelona City Council and will take place from 15-17 February as part of the official line-up of events held to celebrate the feast day of Santa Eulalia. For this event, 10 students, supervised by lecturers Marta Garcia-Orte and Iñaki Baquero, created an installation entitled “Green Bottle”, which will be on display for the duration of the festival at the Jardí del Sol, in Barcelona’s Poblenou district (Carrer de la Ciutat de Granada, 102).

The aim of the project is to symbolically fill with green the parts of the vertical garden that have still not been enveloped by plant-life. To do so, they used hundreds of recycled plastic bottles, which were painted green and lit inside with low-energy Christmas lights. “Recycling is one of the main threads of the project, as it was originally envisioned as an awareness campaign for attracting attention to the amount of single-use plastic we generate”, explains student Nieves Blackstad. The installation makes use of the façade from one of the buildings facing the park, the entire height of which has been covered with recycled bottles, giving the sensation of having been engulfed by plants.

For the second year in a row, the Llum BCN Festival will occupy the streets of Poblenou in efforts to turn the neighbourhood into “a massive outdoor experimental laboratory, using light as a means of creativity”, in the words of the City Council. This year’s edition will feature twenty-odd internationally renowned artists, such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Daniel Canogar. The festival also draws on contributions from students from Barcelona’s numerous schools of art, design and architecture, who, this year, will present a total of 15 installations, including that created by the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture.