“Voted”: this is the expression you hear, after having slipped your ballot into the ballot box. This is also the title of Flora Koel’s project. This 29-year-old Parisian artist reuses unused ballots. The result: furniture made for the municipalities of Île-de-France.
The Festival of Lights 2022 in Lyon
What if your presidential candidate’s ballot could be reincarnated into a beanbag, used in your child’s preschool? This is what Flora Koel, a resident of Paris, does thanks to the excess ballot papers. It recovers these electoral documents which have not been used, from town halls in Île-de-France. Hundreds of kilos of paper which live a second lifein the town where this design-loving artist comes to collect them.
“To make this sofa, I used 80 kilos of paper. It was not necessary to exceed a certain weight, so that it remains transportable”, explains the designer. Each time, his key word is “circuit court“. “I specialize in the use of local resources, the idea is to work in the territories where I live. My creations should not require a lot of transport“, indicates Flora.
This object is part of a set of furniture supplied in 2020, to the city of Vincennes (Val-de-Marne). The town hall was looking for furniture, especially for its schools. Flora then chose, with the designer Alexandre Echasseriau, to recycle the waste from the last municipal elections. She moves to collect these reams of paper that have not been used. Before starting the design, the manufacturing and then the assembly. “It took a good big week, about ten days, to make this sofa from start to finish.“, she recalls.
Since then, Flora hasn’t stopped. At the moment, she is struggling to make several pieces of furniture for the town hall of the 9th arrondissement, in Paris. “They want to redevelop their entrance hall“, specifies this 29-year-old artist. For the municipality, it will therefore be sofas, coffee tables and stools. “And two poufs for the Poussins du Neuf“, she wishes to add. This is the space reserved for parents and children, in this town hall.
At the same time, she is also working on other creations for the towns of Gennevilliers (Hauts-de-Seine) and Charenton (Val-de-Marne). “The first project is somewhat different, since I design it with the inhabitants. For Charenton, on the other hand, it is a question of working on the supply of furniture for the reading area of the city’s libraries and kindergartens. Benches for example, made with these voting documents and wood“, adds Flora.
To complete these different projects, the artist started from an observation: “I asked myself the question as a citizen: what to do with all this amount of paper?” In her studio in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis), Flora therefore decided to “highlight this waste and make this quantity visible in order to be able to account for it“.
It follows draconian criteria, both in form and content. “I set myself the idea not to use glue, but to press the wood and the paper. The ballots are in A6 format. I don’t have to cut them, so as not to lose material and so that the shapes of the ballots remain identifiable“, specifies the Parisian designer.
With one exception: “There should be no comments related to political parties. The ballots are rendered neutral, since the reams of paper are squeezed so that only the outlines are visible. The idea is to keep only the colors of the legislative ballots and the format, for those of the presidential election. I want to valorize the raw material”.
Many requirements and many projects in perspective, for this graduate of a master’s degree in design in Saint-Etienne (Loire) and the Beaux-Arts in Lyon (Rhône). Next objective for Flora: the Europeans of 2024, for which she hopes for new collaborations with the town halls of the region.
