Live from an old military fortress, we welcome you to our website. We are Dom and Thomas, two passionate guys, who together with many friends and volunteers, have started Recup Paris in 2016.
Recup Paris operates at the intersection of art and sustainability. Our mission is to Recover, Revive and Repeat. Recover materials and urban spaces, revive and transform these and repeat this process in order to increase our impact on a sustainable world.
We envision a world powered by culture, art and creative industries. We believe that culture, creativity and the arts are carriers of ideas and shape the way we see the world. They are capable of influencing our futures and help us imagine new and alternative responses to some of the world’s most pressing problems. Our ambition is to regenerate disused urban areas and to transform these into breeding grounds for culture and creativity.
We are inspired by how in cities like Amsterdam, Berlin, London and New York, disused areas have been revived and many have become breeding grounds for culture and creativity. They are important centers of change. Paris is the city of the arts and has an extremely rich cultural sector, yet the city is facing its own particular challenges in terms of sustainability and urban regeneration. There is a real need in Paris at the moment for sustainability and rebuilding communities. We believe that the city needs this now and we want to be at the center of that.
Our journey starts at Fort d’Aubervilliers, an old disused military fortress from the 1840’s, covering 36 hectares and located just outside Paris.
At this unique heritage site we have renovated our first space (an old bunker, no.3 of a total of 24 bunkers), to be used as our atelier and headquarters. Step-by-step and learning as we went along, we worked every day for six months to redevelop the space, using almost exclusively abandoned materials that we found on-site. This allowed us to prove our own concept and save quite a bit on material expenses too.
In this space, we have created our first art series based on recovered postal stamps, accompanied by hand-made frames from reclaimed pallet wood and coordinated and organised several activities and social events.
We are in the process of renovating a second and bordering space, and have started the cleaning up of further spaces. These will become multi functional event spaces to increasingly host a wide range of activities including art expositions, music and theater performances, photo – and video shootings, team building events and workshops.
A way of financing this journey is, besides the exploitation of these spaces, through our art. In our atelier at the Fort, we make art based on recovered materials. Combining old and where necessary new materials, mixing classic techniques with modern technologies to create beautiful, thought provoking and meaningful pieces. We restore furniture and other objects and give these a new lease of life. Our art and crafts are an embodiment of Recup – highly symbolic for what we stand for.
