Casa de Conciencia

If cocooning or retreating into the home and shutting out the rest of the world was de rigueur seasons ago, now it just seems too selfish, insensitive and downright irresponsible. Especially since the world’s resources are rapidly being depleted, global warming is taking its toll and our very existence is at stake.

How we decorate our homes and how we live no longer just involve ourselves — they both have repercussions that affect the survival of the planet. It’s something trendsetters like the Maison & Objet trend laboratory in Paris can no longer ignore and just had to tackle head-on with their forecast for the season.

The time has come to consume responsibly and to invent desirable development with new methods that restore the quality of our gestures. There’s a need to retrieve, recycle, and inaugurate new uses with materials. Design can reduce material; art can turn rubbish into gold. It is a new responsible and glamorous attitude, an art de vivre where the mechanics of the useful can reestablish a better world.

Alternatif

For Vincent Gregoire of the Nelly Rodi agency, the alternative lifestyle is ruled by the keywords “rethink, reduce, reuse and recycle.” The urgency of the ecological situation dictates new protocols for re-creation. The eco-citizen strives to reduce waste but not pleasure. He calls for an “ecosophy” of useful glamour, which gives a new lease on life to objects and materials. Plastic mineral water bottles are bundled together to make a sculptural chandelier, old tires make chic Moroccan-inspired tables when gilded, and old plastic soldiers are put to good use as a decorative bowl when melded together and whitewashed.

Consumption, in general, should be reduced. So that there are no plastic mineral water bottles to be recycled in the first place, companies like Electrolux offer water purification systems that can produce still and sparkling water at home. The ubiquity of cleverly and aesthetically designed piggy banks drives home the point of being more economical instead of consuming mindlessly. The same goes for novel trash-sorting bins that facilitate proper recycling of waste.

Better production, on the other hand, optimizes resources and cuts waste. This includes using natural materials, following the seasons and respecting the ecological process. Organic farming is pivotal here, disavowing the use of chemicals that pollute the environment as well as our bodies. Better production also means fair and ethical trade, offering workers and small producers from the least advanced countries opportunities for development through proper wages (above the current averages), stable revenues, good working conditions, prohibiting forced labor and child labor, avoiding race or gender discrimination, allowing free unions, and respecting safety and hygiene conditions.

Proving that beautiful and good can come together, the “Design of Conscience” collections of Artecnica link talents with the traditional know-how of artisans in Vietnam, Brazil and South Africa: Tord Boontje designs porcelain tableware and silver vases with his magical foliage; Hella Jongerius makes charming bead and floral charms for ceramic accessories; and Emma Woffenden uses recycled glass to make novel frosted decanters and tumblers in unusual colors.

Artsy Craftsy

Thanks to Francois Bernard’s forecast, the future of the artisan never looked so good. Disenfranchised by globalization, mass production and hyper-consumption, the unique objects he creates by hand are now elevated to the venerated status they deserve. Bernard espouses a new, very human, luxury-based quality and know-how. It privileges the emotion produced by objects made in micro-production, placing importance on the work of man as opposed to machines: A manifesto of the beauty of singular objects that hearken back to the Arts & Crafts Movement.

It is no wonder that designers like Bernard turn to craftsmen in the countryside or to developing countries like ours which still have artisans that produce unique, handcrafted objects.

The task at hand, though, is to make their craft relevant to the consumer of today. And this means, according to Bernard, “no more of the sappy, overly personal and naively ethnic artisanal work.”

The industrial aesthetic continues to be a source of inspiration with objects made of brightly colored painted sheet metal, stainless steel, copper, black cast iron, stripped or nearly stripped wood, 3-D fabrics, cashmeres, thick leather, discharged block prints, irregular hand-blown glass and ceramics — all flaunting their workmanship and their construction.

Scrap To Art

For Elizabeth Leriche, art is scrounging in the trash cans of the society of consumption. From the planetary landfill overflowing with useless objects, one can find materials to recreate banal, valueless things that are potential resources for an act of creation.

She assembled a group of artists who have been rummaging the refuse of daily life, practicing the art of recouping and gracefully transforming raw materials by creating new forms for them. Leriche calls it “an unusual, interactive object lesson, a metaphor for an era caught between the fear of an eco-disaster and the desire to create a new world.” Aestheticizing waste is a way of thumbing one’s nose at the snares of ostentatious luxury and the ready to discard.

Using scrap cardboard, tape and egg cartons, Patrick Bailly created “The Shelter,” an undulating cocoon that “turns us into children who are more interested in the box than the toy.” Uplights and round peepholes give a futuristic feeling to this spacecraft from the favelas.  Benjamin Sabatier takes a critical look at packaging which has become overwhelmingly important. He observes that “today, everything has to be stamped and regulated. Chance and the unpredictable no longer have a place in our globalized free-market world.”

His “IBK Box III and “IBK Box IV” are virtual box sculptures made of different rolls of tape and discarded packaging, showing the profusion of images, signs and meanings that mirror our evolution. His “IBK Scotch Towers” made of different rolls of tape were like sacred temple pillars in a recycled fantasyland.

The French atelier, Facteur Celeste, incites us to produce our own products by teaching us how to use our hands to work with recycled materials. The plastic bags of our daily lives are rich resources with a lot of potential. One plastic bag can provide six meters of ribbon that can be knitted or crocheted, braided or transformed. It’s amazing what pieces they come up with from this non-biodegradable pollutant: crocheted bags, dolls, rugs, floral accessories, even jewelry.

What’s more important is that the act of creating them from junk is a moment to yourself, a break that lets you get away from it all, and gives you the pleasure of saying afterward, “I made it myself . . . with a plastic bag.”

And for the most ecologically correct Christmas tree, Regis-R suggests one made from recycled unwanted toys, plastic containers, even a discarded mannequin — all merrily strung together to the tune of your favorite carols. Now, isn’t that a most conscientious Christmas that will keep you nice and warm for the holidays?

Sorting garbage need not be a dreary affair.