Arnaud Eubelen treats the city as a matériotheque for his futuristic designs

Belgian sculptor and designer Arnaud Eubelen describes his artefacts as occupying 'the no-man's land between sculpture and design' on his website. Cobbled together from discarded material and refuse, the product designs he creates straddle notions of functionality and an edginess that surpasses conventional aesthetics. Questioning how we may recontextualise waste, for Eubelen, the city serves as inspiration or a 'matériotheque' as he puts it. Noting this alternative means of collecting material for his futuristic furniture designs, he tells STIR, "I'm attracted by a lot of materials but let's just say that the ones I find most of the time are steel, recomposed wood, glass, plastic, concrete, leather...Most of the time, I select materials that are neutral in appearance, i.e. that you can use more or less easily without seeing their old functions."

The industrial designer's practice ranges from futuristic designs to low-tech inspired sculptures. To Eubelen's credit, the artefacts feel sleek, with small details such as bolted elements or screws making them feel quite industrial. The suggestion that these were ever sundry waste or refuse is strikingly absent in the designs he creates. For instance, his design for the Nostalgia CD rack (2024), with its sleek glass top, feels very refined and yet is made of the found objects Eubelen discovered on his explorations of the city. "I don't look for things specifically, I rely more on the randomness of my journeys around town from point A to point B to be lucky enough to come across one thing or another. I collect everything by bike, and when the materials are too big, I transport them with a homemade trailer," he tells STIR about his instinctive methods of scavenging.

It is the materials that inspire the designs, not the other way round, the product designer elaborates. "Most of the things we find outside are often the product of mass industry, which has standardised everything we own. Surprisingly, this uniformity generates dimensions that can be recombined in an almost infinite number of ways," he notes. Within this unlimited yet confined material library, Eubelen has managed to create everything from lighting designs to chairs to even tables, all with a seemingly signature aesthetic quality tying them together. This aesthetic presents an almost apocalyptic vision for the future of product design, which draws on punk and do-it-yourself culture, but is Eubelen's own. "It's true that the aesthetic I'm developing is in some ways linked to DIY. I think it's the spontaneity of the gesture that attracts me to it above all. Transparency is a quality that I like to work with, it allows you to see the guts of the objects, what they're made of, how they stand up," he states.

His chairs, such as the Soft and Clear series (2024 - ongoing), are made out of thick PVC foil, with thin legs of steel rods, all designed for easy disassembly. This also means that any parts of the upcycled design that are worn out can be replaced with ease. "The things I build are almost like exploded technical views, where all the elements are disconnected, [and] a gap is introduced between each material so that they are all visible. This brings a certain lightness but also a fragility, the idea that these objects retain a kind of ephemerality, assembled mechanically by a few nuts and bolts and that they can become scattered elements again in the future appeals to me a lot," the Belgian designer notes.

Most recently, the Liege-based designer created a series of lamp designs for a residency in France. The Rock Steady series (2025), as he dubbed them, makes use of bluestone from a local museum, slabs of shale from a demolition site, spotlights from a former lighting showroom and a hotel room and threaded rods. Notably, none of the materials he used were in any way novel; they were all repurposed for the project. The resulting series is brutalist in its language, with spotlights strapped onto slabs of stone that could easily occupy the same universe as his latest armchair, As Long As The Body Follows (2025), with the Sticky Table (2025) completing the scene. These recent designs also point to a shift in Eubelen's aesthetics from sci-fi inspirations to objects that reference past design eras. As Long As The Body Follows is particularly reminiscent of '70s design, while Sticky Table was inspired by a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph. The tabletop has leather fabric stretched over it to give the illusion of dynamism.

Eubelen's practice of repurposing began when he was an industrial design student and experimenting with how to make do with what was available for school models. Once he moved to Brussels, Belgium, an interest in photography further allowed him to look at his surroundings with a particular lens. As he tells STIR, "I saw so many things lying around in the street—the link between the inside of the house, where all these things came from and the path where they ended up—[and] I really wanted to reconnect the two, [...] to find a way of reshaping with the minimum of techniques what is no longer desired."

Elaborating on how this has become a generative practice for him, Eubelen adds, "It's a surprisingly liberating way of discovering lots of different materials." The idea of waste acting as a material repository prompts the industry, built on the notion of single use, to consider circular design and the liberating creativity of reuse. It becomes not only a practice of care towards the world, but can also offer an innovative lens to work with what is available. Eubelen notes in conclusion, "I also think that these produced things reside in an idea of adaptability, of reshaping our conceptions from the inside out. They question and highlight the cycles of value of the things that surround us at various scales."