Serinus

Many top-quality materials are used in single-use products, and Serinus is a project born from the need to push against this massive waste of our planet’s finite resources.

The Serinus project sets its sights on the world of wine and its logistics systems. Wooden boxes are used to transport goods, resulting in a great deal of logging on the Iberian Peninsula. After transportation, these boxes are mainly discarded. Their short life-cycle aptly illustrates the endemic misuse of materials.

It is in this context that Serinus has produced a collection of three bird boxes with waste wood from the winemaking industry. These boxes give the wood a second “life,” underscore the link with organic vineyards, sustainably extend the life cycle, and return the wood to nature.

The nexus of the Serinus project and the winemaking industry was Bodega Cosme, and particularly the bodega’s warehouse, a place of where goods are constantly coming and going. Once the wine bottles have been removed from their wooden casings, those boxes are slated for destruction, although the materials remain as good as new.

This project is, in a way, a critique of the logistics techniques used in the wine sector and many others, where prime materials are wastefully discarded at the beginning of their useful life cycles.

The Serinus bird boxes have been distributed to Catalan organic vineyards, where the vines are treated according to ecological practices; that is, through an ecosystem or agrosystem that takes into account the species that share the agricultural land, and where chemicals and additives are not used.

These same species feed on pests and insects that harm the vines and the resulting wines. The bird boxes give the highest creatures of this ecosystem, the birds, a place to develop and reproduce in the vineyards, which are generally barren and dry and lacking in good nesting spaces.