I like Joe’s ‘lighting’ initiative so let’s stay with it. The Bollo Lamps from Brion Experimental (the company behind Placentero, which you 3ringers first saw last year) reinterpret a common, everyday item - something in all our waste baskets, born of frustration, perhaps even disappointment: a crumpled piece of paper. Instead of being made from paper, which would make the Bollo less an interpretation than a literal reconfiguration, the lamp is made from moldable plastic.

Bollo, lamps. Designed by Leonardo Liberti. Manufactured by Brion Experimental.

The best thing about the Bollo is that users can make their own crumpled heap. At the Bollo’s exhibition during the Diseño con Acento furniture and design show in Córdoba, passersby could don a pair of protective gloves and form their own lamp from flat plastic 30 x 30 sheets that had been warmed in a small oven to make the material malleable; the creations became souvenirs. While most of us didn’t have the luck to be at the only avant garde design show in Latin America, we can still visit the Brion company website to order any of the three Bollo lamps.

Hanging, standing, or sitting, Bollo uses its shape and color to attract attention. The pendant fixture appears like a UFO circling your living room, especially in green, which casts a supernatural glow reminiscent of Simpsons’ uranium. I’d like to see a constellation of hanging Bollos at the Natural History Museum in Manhattan, circling the giant whale like radiated krill. The standing Bollo rests on three slim legs. It looks like a Portuguese man-o-war; this effect is intensified when the lamp is pink. A group of these would be perfect in the lobby of the new wing of the Denver Art Museum, where their round irregularity would be an ideal contrast with the building’s sharp angularity. The floor Bollo is a vibrant lump; this model is the closest to the lamp’s original concept, since its location on the floor recalls that wadded piece of paper thrown across the room in disgruntlement. The intense color and beaming light, however, reinvigorate what we had previously discarded-an apt metaphor for revisiting our mistakes.

With offices in Buenos Aires, Boca Raton, and Tokyo, Brion is a truly international-transoceanic actually-company. Their Bollos seem to be reproducing and popping up everywhere. In fact, the Bollos just might be the gremlins of the lighting industry. You might as well give in to the desire. Here’s my bright idea: some clever curator should buy a slew of Bollos for the next Body Worlds exhibition and hang them above the posed cadavers to represent disembodied brains.