Six creative crowdfunding projects worth supporting this April

From a wordless graphic novel to a project to turn an olive farm into a retreat for creatives and even a project turning plastic into homeware.

Light Salone

Light Salone is social upliftment through engineering campaign with the aim of providing small-scale renewable energy to rural areas in Sierra Leone. They are a team of 10 people working passionately to innovate where it really matters using low-cost engineering solutions.

They are all about building multiple small-scale energy generators, even from recycled materials, for use in areas with limited access to technology. Light Salone has built useful appliances such as a hydro generator built from spoons with an output of 220 Volts, a fuel-free generator with an output of 300 Watts and a solar book for students living in remote environments to study.

Dragon's Delusion

A vibrant, surreal animation from Hong Kong, Dragon's Delusion is a film about artificial intelligence, humanity's fixation with eternal life and the question of where the soul sits among all of it. Renowned art director and animator Kong Kee and his team aim to make an animation that delivers dazzling visual effects and depictions of human emotions that transcend time, aimed at young adults.

Turning plastic waste into bespoke homeware

Sandhelden is a young tech-startup based in the city of Augsburg, Germany. They are a diverse team of designers and engineers with a vision to set new standards in recycling processes using their self-developed 3D printing technology dubbed "Binder Jetting".

Sandhelden turns plastic refuse into beautifully modelled bowls, kitchen sinks and other durable items for the home. Their production process entails crushing any kind of plastic waste into a rudimentary powder (which can also be mixed with discarded ceramics or sand), before fusing the powder into a new form using a binding technique in 3D-printing. 

"Z", a wordless graphic novel

For the comic book reader with a taste for the darker stuff, Z is a 96-page psychotropic graphic novel by Spanish visual artist Valentin Ramon. Designed to circumvent the divisions of language and tell its unusual story without speech, Z follows the life of a nihilistic detective set against a dystopian backdrop.

According to the creator, "Z is a personal view about the origins of terrorism. Expect some government conspiracies, diabolic corporations and religious blindness. It is a visual, dystopian metaphor inside a song without lyrics, a lonely scream on the sea of human stupidity inside a silly book."

The Co Project brain spa 

Head of the UnSchool of Disruptive Design, Leyla Aceroglu, is opening a creative incubation space situated in Portugal. She and her team are giving a dilapidated olive oil farm a new lease on life by turning it into a creative retreat location for designers to brew new projects away from the urban hustle.

 Steeped in local history, this Quinta (farm) is being regenerated into a new haven for creative and cultural experiences: a Brain Spa.

The first digital archive of Mexican fashion

The first digital archive of contemporary Mexican fashion, Archivo Moda Mexicana is a promotion and content platform that will allow independent fashion designers to get to know and connect with new consumers nationally and internationally.

 The folks behind this venture want to share with the world all that Mexican fashion has to offer through a single channel. It will bring burgeoning and established fashion designers together, exploring all that goes on behind their work and couture collections.

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