In recent years there has been a rising interest of the public to access products and services made of local materials, created in an ethical manner. The results of such demand points towards products sensitive to their environment and respectful to the available resources and social groups involved in their production. Maintaining a balance between the rhythms of production and consumption could lead to a lifestyle promising a prosperous sustainable future for the generations to come, based on the ideas of community, collaboration and sharing.

Native Products is an initiative that could act as a stepping point towards the exploration of alternative mediums and processes of the production cycle. Papairlines have developed a Native Product workshop sequence through which flora is transformed into a paste that can be later used as a raw material to cast objects. The process uses household tools and herbs.
Through workshops the project focuses on supporting a future lifestyle, balanced with nature’s rhythms, as well as raising awareness on the subject of production and consumption by sharing the entire process of developing basic home grown objects.
From growing the raw materials to manufacturing the final product, the project aims to immerse participants in the narrative of product lifecycle, design, ecology and ethical production. During the final stages of the project an open workshop takes place for visitors to participate in the different stages of processing the raw materials and creating small utilitarian objects, grown, designed and produced in a specific geographic location.

A first edition of Native Products was realised at The Barbican Centre in London as part of Hack the Barbican initiative, in August 2013. For this edition papairlines, explored notions of local production, product development and manufacture. Hacking parts of the Lakeside & Barbican Gardens new crops were cultivated, that were later used as raw materials along with existing garden flora, for the production of utilitarian products.

Hack The Barbican, 5-31 August 2013, London