We live surrounded by objects destined to be replaced. Contemporary material culture has progressively shortened the lifespan of things: technologies evolve, domestic rituals change, aesthetic codes shift, and what was part of the everyday landscape of our homes only a few decades ago can suddenly become obsolete. Yet the loss of function does not necessarily mean the loss of meaning.

“The past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present.”

— Maurice Halbwachs


Objects are also repositories of social memory. A piece of porcelain, a silver service, or an opaline glass lamp speaks of particular ways of living, entertaining, illuminating a space, and expressing identity through the home. When these objects disappear from everyday use, what remains is not simply an aesthetic form, but the material trace of gestures, habits, and aspirations belonging to another era.

It is exactly in this unclear zone, the one between survival and oblivion, that the works of Alexandre Veillon emerge. An artist and a designer who taught himself, Veillon makes use of the materials of his childhood in the Charente region - porcelain, opaline glass, and silverware - in order to create hybrid forms that evoke new meanings and feelings.

His approach, however, is far removed from a nostalgic logic of recovery. Veillon does not restore these objects, nor does he attempt to return them to some presumed original authenticity. Instead, he places them in tension with a radically different vocabulary: metal structures, bolts, brackets, and mechanical devices surround materials now regarded as outdated. In the works documented in his portfolio, the delicacy of opaline glass and porcelain coexists with an almost industrial language, giving rise to strange domestic organisms that appear at once familiar and alien.

Simone Lorusso: Your practice begins with very specific objects and materials—porcelain, opaline glass, silverware—which are also connected to your childhood in the Charente region. When you choose an object, how important is its personal history, and how important is what it might reveal about a broader collective memory?

Alexandre Veillon: I grew up in a traditional environment, surrounded by antiques and family heirlooms — things kept as an inheritance, as a memory, because they also embodied social status, conventions, and became almost untouchable as a result. I think that, at first, repurposing these objects was a way for me to reclaim that history, to free myself too from those conventions, and to offer a new reading of these objects.

SL: We live in a society in which objects are being replaced at an increasingly rapid pace, to the point that obsolescence has almost become an ordinary condition of everyday life. Can your work also be read as a critique of the contemporary way we consume, discard, and forget things?

AV: Working with what already exists has always come naturally to me. There’s so much you can play with — it becomes almost a game, something playful, where I ask myself: how can I give this object its place back? So it’s less a critique than a solution I’m proposing, on my own modest scale — another way of appreciating the value of these forgotten objects.

SL: In your work, the encounter between materials often feels almost like a collision: the fragility and decorative qualities of porcelain or opaline glass are confronted with cold metal structures, bolts, and mechanical components. What does this tension represent for you? Is it a form of protection, constraint, or transformation?

AV: It’s above all a desire for constraint. I like the notion of collision, and playing with the physical limits of materials. My pieces are often on the verge of breaking, and I believe you can feel an emotion when looking at them — empathy, fear, or simply laughter. This tension can be read freely: some might see it as a representation of the passage of time, a contemporary structure constraining an old, fragile piece of glass. Others might see the violence of our era confronting the delicacy, the naivety, of the past.

SL: The contemporary design world’s return to the past can easily slip into nostalgia. In your work, however, objects seem to lose their original identity in order to acquire a new one. How important is it for you to avoid a nostalgic vision of the past?

AV: The emotion I’m after above all is the anachronistic effect: taking a very old object and giving it a futuristic structure or aesthetic. That creates an aesthetic shock. The object becomes timeless, detached from any trend, from any nostalgia. And that’s the most beautiful thing you could wish for an object — to be old and yet become immortal. I also think it’s important, in design as in life, to live with one’s time, not to give in to backward-looking ideas or, in any case, to reconcile past, present, and future.

SL: Many of the objects you work with historically belong to the domestic sphere and carry with them rituals, social conventions, and even certain ideas of taste and decorum. When you transform them into sculptures, what do you think happens to the memory of the people who once owned and used them?

AV: I’ve already partly answered this, but the memory of those who owned these objects doesn’t really concern me. What interests me more, perhaps, is the memory of the object itself. What I’m after is the surprise produced by diverting an object from its function and from the conventions attached to it. I work this way freely and instinctively, to arrive at an object that gives off an emotion, not a relic weighed down by its own history.

SL: There is also a question of value. Many of the materials and objects we now encounter in flea markets or regard as old-fashioned were, at other points in history, symbols of taste, status, or modernity. Who decides when an object ceases to have value? And can art challenge or reshape that hierarchy?

AV: Yes, I think art can completely overturn this hierarchy. We find many objects that seem outdated today, even though in their time they were symbols of good taste and social status. With my work, I find it amusing to put these thoroughly unfashionable relics on display, as if the object were saying: “Look at me, you forgot me for so many years, but here I am again, and I still have good years ahead of me.”

But this notion of “good taste” is still, unfortunately, dictated by elites. It’s a continuous cycle. Plenty of objects will fall back into oblivion, and I’m already looking forward to giving them a second chance.

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Words: Simone Lorusso