Thomas Noui and Victor Robin founded Zbeul Studio in 2023. The name comes from Arabic, where the root means "rubbish" or "something teeming with life" — in French slang, chaos, mess.
I look at their chair "Archeologia." It's made of animal bone, stained black. Not recycling: the bone isn't processed into something else, it stays bone.
Some companies build entire sustainability or innovation stories around how they "refine" waste — upcycling as process, effort, justification. Zbeul shows: sometimes the real achievement is just the permission to leave something as it is, and simply give it a new address.
Zbeul practices Dada's readymade. A skeleton, which we know as the support system for biological bodies, gets discovered as a piece of furniture. The designers don't invent a new function for waste — they relocate a structure that already exists, from one experiential space into another (from presumed inside the animal body to perceptible before us, to touch and look at). This works through the courage to ignore an industrial-society convention that suddenly doesn't seem so important anymore. Do bones remind us too much of death and impermanence? Why?
Zbeul takes the bone structure and honors the meaningful form that arose from nature, now serving a practical purpose. Across all cultures, we know that natural materials have always also been assigned a secret meaning. That stays open with Zbeul, and I like that.