Court-circuit

For Court-Circuit, MAD resident Atelier Peau joined forces with Les Petits Riens and L'Ouvroir to create a new sustainable product 100% made in Brussels. The result is a collection of leather goods made from upcycled leather jackets found by Basile Boon (Atelier Peau) at Les Petits Riens. L'Ouvroir, a social Brussels-based enterprise, took on the challenge of producing them. Today, the leather products are sold in the Petits Riens shops as well as in other concept stores.

The Handymade project was initiated in response to a call for projects from the City of Brussels to upgrade the tarpaulin used on the scaffolding during Brussels' Grand Place's buildings renovations. The aim was to repurpose what would otherwise be considered as waste material.

MAD connected designer Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte with L'Ouvroir, an adapted work company whose objective is to provide gainful and rewarding work for people with disabilities. Together, they collaborated on a collection of 480 bags made out of the canvas sheet that hung on the scaffolding. In order to pinpoint the exact location of the piece of fabric every bag is made of, each of them has a metal label numbered from 1 to 480.

Subsequently, MAD continued to upgrade the city's site tarpaulins by designing and producing computer bags for the city's employees. This product was designed by Atelier Peau's leather goods maker, Basile Boon, and produced by L'Ouvroir.

Thanks to these projects, MAD has encouraged the City of Brussels to adapt its contracts in order to recover tarpaulins at the end of the construction work.  At the same time, we are exploring with the Mekanika collective (industrial designer, business developer and industrial engineer) the technical characteristics of the material that makes up the majority of site tarpaulins in order to identify industrial upgrades.