‘Avocado Seed Powered Car’ was developed as part of ‘La Rentrada’, a project that seeks to imagine an economy around avocado seed.

The inspiration for ‘Avocado Seed Powered Car’ was the series of shortages of gasoline that started in 2019 in Vene- zuela, the country with the largest petroleum reserves in the world, due to the breaking down of the country’s refineries. In this context, Venezuelan citizens have been reinventing ways of transporting themselves attaching trailers to bicycles to transport goods.

Drawing from a wave of efforts in the 1980s in the auto- mobile industry to push vegetable oil as an alternative fuel, Fragmentario set out to find if avocado-seed oil could be an appropiate alternative fuel.

Using Instagram, with the hashtags #veggiebenz and #veggiecar, I found Avalon Mathias, a car shop owner who runs a Mercedes Benz with waste vegetable oil that she collects from restaurants. Just as I do with avocado seeds.

After contacting her in the fall of 2020, in the Spring of 2021, she became part of the world of La Rentrada for a day in which I recorded a video of Avalon running her car on avocado seed oil. In the video, as she pours avocado seed oil into her car, she is wearing a white outfit I made. Later, as she enters the avocado seed zone, she is wearing another outfit I made, dyed with avocado seeds into a pink hue.

First considered a conceptual design experiment, it took a new meaning with Avalon participating, a person who everyday chooses to re-enter, to question the world around her and invent her own rules.