Victor Castro, a Mexican artist residing in Peru, just had an art exhibit in Lima named "Derivadas: Resultantes de un proceso de recolección" (Derivatives: Results of a collection process.)  Through social networks that span schools, neighborhood stores, and chains of friends, Victor is collecting the tops of plastic bottles for a monumental sculpture that requires 931,700 bottle caps. In Lima, PET bottles are not recycled (yet)  but through this social art project, people (mainly children) are learning the culture of separating the garbage and compacting the bottles so that they take less space before putting them in the trash.

So far he has collected 250,000 bottle tops with the specifications for his monumental sculpture, but in the process, he has received many variations of bottle caps that have sparked other creative ideas. Hence, this recent exhibit displays these "derivative" pieces. As part of the exhibit, guests were encouraged to bring more bottle caps and they were part of the creation of a living art piece through their direct participation.

Victor Castro is demonstrating how art can be a motor for change. His art through social process of collection of waste materials from industrial societies, he is raising awareness, promoting civic participation, and creating the conditions for ideas and solutions to social and environmental problems.

Victor has been a collaborator of Syntony Quest's initiative on Conscious Art since 2001.
To learn more about his social art work, visit his websites:
http://galeria.efevece.org
http://soy-un-recolector.blogspot.com