Plastic carrier bags glow like lamps from within two skips that Spanish lighting designers Luzinterruptus have placed at the entrance to the Gewerbemuseum in northern Switzerland.
The designers selected the most brightly coloured bags from over 5000 collected from museum visitors and have filled each one with air as if it were a balloon.
The installation, entitled Plastic Garbage Guarding the Museum, accompanies a four-month exhibition that looks at how the culture of using and throwing away plastic bags is representative of consumer society.
The illuminated bags will remain outside the museum for the duration of the show, where their colours will fade and they will become increasingly dirty.
For the opening night the designers also filled a square outside the museum with more of the brightly lit carriers. Some were scattered on the ground as toys, while others were filled with helium and tethered on strings.
The Oh, Plastiksack! exhibition runs until 7 October.
Other lighting projects by Luzinterruptus include an army of glowing scarecrows and a set of stick-on nipples.
See all our stories about Luzinterruptus »
Here's an explanation from Luzinterruptus:
The past month of June we went to Switzerland with our lights, invited by the Gewerbemuseum of Winthertur to form part of the Oh, Plastiksack! , monographic exhibition on plastic bags curated by Susanna Kumschick.
As always, we chose to work in the street, just because we wanted the whole world to be able to see what we were doing and how we were doing it.
The monographic theme being the bags, we wanted to collect the largest number of them from among the inhabitants of the city, our friends at the museum had the wonderful idea of exchanging bags for tickets to visit the exhibitions, a very interesting proposition that helped to collect more than 5,000 bags and a lot of visitors eager to take a free tour of a museum of applied arts as exemplary and didactic as the Gewerbemuseum.
For our piece Plastic garbage guarding the museum, we chose the most colorful and luxurious bags from among the thousands that were donated and with them we filled two large containers that were located on either side of the main door of the building. We placed light inside them and left them for the next 4 months to see how they evolve.
The first few days of the installation were the most striking and spectacular, with all the bags perfectly placed and filled with air. After a few weeks the display was no longer as pleasing to the eye and surely after 4 months it will look truly decrepit.
This, far from worrying us, helps us to make sense of an installation which you can experience, in a visual manner, the reality of plastic bags, objects generally created with the purpose of inviting consumption and building an image that speaks positively about the brand, but that once used, if not carefully recycled, they become very damaging and impossible to remove from the environment.
In addition, on the day of the inauguration, we used more illuminated plastic bags to intervene in the surroundings of the museum, filling a small square with them in which we created a gathering space in which the people could sit and dedicate themselves to finding, for example, those of their favorite stores.
In addition, we presented visitors with floating illuminated trash bags, that the people carried throughout the whole city, filling the sky with small plasticized full moons.