Art Scene

By FernAnde VAn tets

Ziad Abi Chaker

the accidental artist

When he told onlookers they were looking at what once was plastic bags, their jaws dropped. People were really shocked that plastic bags turned out to be so nice looking! he says.

come to live in a lifestyle that uses these in a really obnoxious way, he says. This is what we started to think about six years ago and this is how we came up with eco-board. Abi Chaker now also makes indoor and outdoor furniture. His chairs are inspired by the designs of Gerrit Rietveld but as eco-board furniture expands he is eager to start taking other peoples designs to manufacture. Coffee tables have already been sold at Plan Bey, a gallery in Beirut. Eventually the designs will be available online. I dont believe in the traditional outlets of commerce. You go buy a chair and 40 percent of the price of that chair is going to pay the rent of where that price has been sitting, he explains. which colours will be used. But we cant control the pattern, its the machine that controls it, he says. The resulting boards are of such beauty that they have even been confused with marble, Abi Chaker says laughing. The enthusiastic engineer was given exhibiting space in a section called This is not wonderland during this years Beirut Art Fair. His boards formed mounting walls for creations by participating artists, as well as his own canvas. When he told onlookers they were looking at what once was plastic bags, their jaws dropped. People were really shocked that plastic bags turned out to be so nice looking! he says. The board, called eco-board, is the result of years of development. Abi Chaker first fell in love with this kind of work as a 19-year old engineering student at Rutgers University in the States. Bored by chemical engineering he started taking courses in environmental engineering and biological resource engineering. A professor invited him to participate in a research project on accelerated compost engineering and the rest, as they say, is history. Having solved how to recycle organic waste and mainstream plastic, he created a machine which could take in all other sorts of plastic todays society produces, such as bags, cutlery and cups. We have On a July morning Abi Chaker was showing off a prefabricated house along the Beirut Corniche, to raise awareness. Now, his workers live in the structure, which is insulated with boards made from Styrofoam cups and has plastic bottles as windows. The company is also working on a design for a bus stop. He is also working with municipalities to ensure small-scale recycling plants are affordable around Lebanon. At the 2011 TEDxBeirut conference Abi Chaker held a passionate and humourous speech chronicling his love affair with waste. Its a love that lasts a lifetime, he said. Who knew it would be so pretty too?
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am interested, call me, said the card tucked into a framed, multi-coloured board at the Beirut Art Fair. Nothing unusual, except that the artwork in question was a piece of recycled plastic, generated from scrap beauty packaging by a machine. Were engineers, were not artists. Were accidental artists if you will, explains Ziad Abi Chaker, the man who developed, (I hate the word invented, he says), the machine, which can turn any kind of plastic into a board of fibres able to replace wood or steel as a building material. The only thing Abi Chaker controls is what kind of shredded plastic goes in as a raw material. You can choose colours, and anticipate

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