tom egoumenides valorizes waste, reviving discarded plastic and spools as functional objects

rascal: from discarded waste to sources of light

Rascal is a series of objects, some functional, some decorative, created from waste products such as plastic bottles and offcuts of thread spools from weavers workshops in the medina of Tunis. Developed by French architect and designer Tom Egoumenides, the project seeks to uncover design solutions from waste recovery driven by a ‘logic and social design’ driven approach.

The workshop and designer’s approach centers around the valorization and poetization of waste, giving new life to useless or unwanted materials while experimenting with forms, contexts, and devising new visual languages. The resulting recycled objects, such as lamps or decorative pieces, have been developed from only minimal interventions and simple techniques.

Tom Egoumenides valorizes recycling and form

Rascal in Tunisian means to ‘reuse’. From the old French ‘Rescaille’, it is ‘a variant of scrap’ or ‘what one has rejected’. These ideologies give name and purpose to Tom Egoumenides’ workshop and project, which seeks to ‘act before the recycling stage’, taking advantage of discarded materials and their existing qualities by trying to modify them with only minimum intervention. ‘What remains is a simple approach that bears witness to the history of the materials and objects,’ explains the designer.

Thomas Egoumenides is a French architect and designer based in Tunisia since 2015. In 2016, he co-founded the design studio Flaÿou with which he participated in the Design Weeks of Paris and Amman, among others. In 2021, during an eight-month residency with the Association l’Art Rue and for the Dream City 2022 Art Festival, he created an ephemeral design and upcycling laboratory for waste materials entitled Rascal.

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project info:

name: Rascal
designer: Tom Egoumenides

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