TIRANA, Nov. 3 – Albania’s nine-time Guinness World Record holder for the largest mosaics using different industrial materials, has embarked on his tenth challenge, this time creating a portrait of the world famous nun of Albanian origin recently declared a saint by Pope Francis 19 years after her death.
The 50-year-old Albanian artist has started working at Prishtina’s Kosovo Museum, to set a new world record for the largest mosaic using 1.5 million metal buttons.
“I know it will be a masterpiece. The deadline is November 1 to 30 but I plan to finish it by November 28 [Albania’s Independence Day],” Strati has told Kosovo’s Koha Ditore newspaper.
“The material where the buttons are attached is wood on a reinforced structure. Only a single kind of material has to be used to make the world’s largest structure in metal buttons,” adds Strati.
Speaking about Mother Teresa, Strati appeals everybody should follow the Catholic nun’s example who dedicated all her life to helping the poor by donating something.
“She [Mother Teresa] worked all her life and I will work for 30 days. Every one of us should donate something. Everything I am doing is dedicated to Kosovo. A new world record for Kosovo,” says Strati.
The Kosovo National museum is set to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the working space where the largest metal button mosaic was created.
Saimir Strati previously set nine Guinness World records for the largest mosaics using nails, toothpicks, corks, sea glass, eggshells, compact discs, coffee beans, porcelain and mirror glass among other materials.
Strati’s Guinness journey started in September 2006 when he created the largest metal nail mosaic. The 8m2 (86.11 sq. feet) mosaic featured a portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci. Two years later, he entered the Guinness World Record for the largest cork mosaic, a 92 m2 artwork named ‘Mediterranea.’
In September 2009, he created the largest paint brush mosaic measuring 26 m2, depicting pop star Michael Jackson.
In November 2010, Strati set a new world record when he made the largest screw artwork contained 235,500 metal screws in an artwork depicting the poet Homer on a banknote.
Back in 2014, he set his ninth record in Portugal with mosaic dedicated to Jose Saramago, the Portuguese 1998 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, using hundreds of thousands of corks.
The artists says his love for mosaics started at a young age when he visited the ancient archaeological park of Apollonia, the second largest in Albania, fascinated by its 3,500 year-old mosaics.
“Using industrial easily available materials is one of the Guinness conditions. Today, we are witnesses of art being industrialized, but I am doing the opposite creating art with industrial materials,” says Strati.
