2020
Atlas des restes
Research, Writing, Drawing, Photography
Atlas des Restes aims to question the relationships we establish with objects that are no longer of use. Rather than approaching sustainability from a technical point of view, it focuses on the relational dynamics between humans and things.
Looking at all the up-cycling practices flourishing in the design industry, I wanted to grasp what is at stake symbolically when working with objects that lost their initial purpose. Atlas des restes started with a question: what happens to what is no longer of use?
The notion of rest is vast, it embraces a lot of different meanings. In order to draw a better understanding of what rests are, I started a typology. Identifying 8 types of rests allowed me to observe their differences. Ruins are not treated the same as residues nor used objects: their associated imaginaries have a strong influence on how we behave and interact with them.
However, all rests have something in common. They share what I have called 3 "residual values": informative (data), affective (imaginaries) and narrative (stories). When we stop perceiving leftovers as inanimate things, we can start seeing them as movements, testimonies and memory occurrences. That is what makes them precious: in each material, stories are hidden.
Developed at ENSCI Les Ateliers, directed by researcher and sociologist Aurélien Fouillet.