Design vigilante Arnaud Eubelen collects discarded materials from the backstreets of the city to assemble low-tech robotic furniture, portraying the poetry of desolate non-places.
He considers the city as his personal hardware store and that is not at all exaggerated. When entering the workshop of Arnaud Eubelen in the run-down neighborhood of Molenbeek in Brussels, the interior reflects the exterior. All sorts of pieces of materials we call rubbish are stacked in a myriad of racks. ‘The city is my materiotheque’, Eubelen says when we seat ourselves in a little room with glass doors and scifi-esque furniture called his office. ‘I bicycle around looking for anything I can use. From the moment a material is thrown away, it devaluates and becomes trash. Yet I find a unique quality in the rubbish. For me, old and worn-down materials illustrate the passage of time’.
Dystopia mania
His fascination for discarded materials ties back to his interests as a teenager. Growing up in the city of Liege, a somber Belgian city with a history of coal mines and heavy steel industry, Eubelen passed his time as a graffiti artist, sneaking his way into abandoned construction sites and broken down buildings within the fringes of the city. ‘In Liege, there are a lot of these places’, he says. ‘It is a city packed with desolate human-made landscapes’. Gradually Eubelen stopped spraying and started photographing these run-down, crumbling places, trying to capture the beauty of morose, contemporary ruins. Later on, his design practice originated from it. It is no wonder that the functional sculptures Eubelen creates emanate a similar feeling to dystopian scifi movies such as Blade Runner where apocalyptic city-scapes fill the screan. Obscurity and Kipple — the word scifi writer Philip K. Dick used to describe rubbish — saturate the signature of Eubelen. ‘That movie had an great influence on me; end-of-the-world type of movies. You could state that my work prepares us for an upcoming apocalyps of the technological society. When all breaks down, you make amends with what you find. I want to show the traces of human kind, instead of mankind itself’.
The underbelly, not the surface
‘I try to portray the rough streets and its facades, sidewalks and anything that’s found laying across. I want to put the street inside the home’.
With robotic-like furniture made from scraps, Eubelen opens the door to a new paradigm of aesthetics and deliberately disrespects the codes and commonalities of design such as clarity, functionality, craftsmanship and beauty in its broadest sense. His disregard for the common modus operandi is absolutely intentional. Eubelen graduated in design at Lacambre in Brussels, learning the common pathways of the design creation process. His practice could very well be considered a direct protest against his college degree and that of others. ‘When you graduate, you’re vision on design is moulded. All across the world, this mould is practically the same, resulting in uniformly styled design products all over’. He fights against slick, shaved and polished design. ‘I don’t appreciate designs consisting of perfect surfaces and soft machine-made shapes. I don’t sit down with a pencil and draw an appealing design shape. My sketches are purely technical. The shape originates during the making, when improvising with the materials available. For that reason i have open racks in my workshop. I need to constantly see what’s at hand’.
Consider this as design from the wrong side of the track. Design that emanates the atmosphere of non-places and non-design. Hence his atelier in Molenbeek. ‘Although places like Molenbeek have their social and economic problems, they also evoke a sense of freedom. You don’t feel any regulations or government control. These are open places where everything seems possible. In cities like Copenhagen, everything is so clean, restricted, inhibited’. Luckily for him, Belgium still contains a few dystopias.
Big real estate projects and gentrification run over neighborhoods all over the world, smoothing out the architecture, the design and the genius loci of the place. Slickness and cleanliness makes up the future dystopia: a brushed and strictly regulated world. ‘I try to go against that. Cities need to maintain a certain degree of roughness. This is also a call for more vernacular architecture and design. I focus on contextual objects that have a strong connection with the environment and the people’.
Punks not dead
Like punk in the seventies, a wave of counterculture emerges nowadays and this time it’s coming from the design world. Newly graduated designers propose design with a clear activist, ecologic, anti-kapitalist and paradigm-altering perspective. Think of open-source design, free for all: collaborative creation where ego’s are thrown out the door; and design as statement, not as product. These youngsters question all parameters of current affairs, including the idea of beauty. Arnaud Eubelen is part of that wave. ‘I leave behind the world of money, producers and galleries and just builds things, often on demand. A gallery once asked me: “What’s the production fee?” There is none’. (laughs). Why should he buy anything? In the current anthropocene, materials roams like ivy. Eubelen picks up the fallen leaves and uses it.
