From Venice with Algae
Venice canal algae turned into postage stamps.
Spanish-Italian designer Pablo Dorigo Sempere has extracted algae polluting the Venetian Lagoon and used it to make paper postage stamps for the Italian city. Dorigo Sempere made the product to showcase the qualities and ingredients of algae paper. Otherwise known as Shiro Alga Carta, this material was first produced in 1992 by Venetian paper company Favini. Titled From Venice with Algae, the stamp project takes its name from a play on the well-known saying "from Paris with love", which comes from the name of a 2010 action film. The designer hopes that, by using the paper method to make stamps, the innovative and eco-friendly material will be sent to and seen by people all across the world. In a bid to better understand the Shiro paper's materiality, Dorigo Sempere learnt to make the paper from scratch with the raw ingredients, including thin powdered algae, coarse powdered algae and cellulose fibres.