Switzerland recycles well - this designer recycles beautifully

Pia Seidel

24/3/2026

Translation: machine translated

Pictures: Pia Seidel

In many places in Switzerland, we dutifully bundle paper into a pile to dispose of it. Kevin Dizami turns it into art and reminds us that beauty often lurks exactly where we least expect it.

Do you know the ritual? Every week, a new pile of adverts, free newspapers and flyers lands in your letterbox. You flick through the pages briefly, sigh and put everything away. At some point, the pages are bundled up, put outside the door or taken to the collection point - and forgotten. Kevin Dizami has scrutinised this ritual.

The Swiss industrial designer with Hispanic-Congolese roots has his studio in Zurich, is represented by Basalto Collective and the Nov Galerie - and transforms this pile of paper into sculptural side tables. Each sheet is stacked, coated with porcelain and fired. The paper itself disappears in the fire, but leaves its mark: immortalised in time, almost unmistakable in its origin.

The idea for the «A4 side table» came to him in Biel. When he moved there, he noticed the neatly stacked bundles of paper on the pavements for the first time and was amazed. «I had never seen that before. I grew up in Lausanne. Maybe I'd just never paid attention to it.» What fascinated him was that people take the time to stack rubbish so carefully. «It is rubbish. But that's exactly what I like about it.»

However, he didn't start his project without some discomfort. Simply taking the perfectly stacked bundles with me felt strange. «People were looking at me: 'What are you doing with all that paper?» What he then found was surprising: invoices, reminders, maybe pay slips. He had expected such documents to be shredded - but far from it. «It's all in there», he says and laughs. So he handled every single sheet all the more carefully.

What followed was anything but easy. The job is pure manual labour - meditative, he says, but also nerve-wracking. The coated paper is wafer-thin and correspondingly fragile: the temperature has to be gradually increased and the firing can take all night. «Firing ceramics is a science in its own right». Nevertheless, everything exploded in the kiln during the first attempt. It took almost two years before the finished pieces were ready.

His attitude comes from a conviction that characterises his entire work - and which he partly anchors in his Congolese heritage. In the Congo, people are familiar with the so-called Article 15, a fictitious but well-known paragraph that means something like: Do with what you have. The Congolese musician Pépé Kallé immortalised it in the 1980s in his song of the same name - and it has been a philosophy of life ever since. Wheels become furniture, fabrics become costumes, scrap becomes material. «They see what we regard as waste as a resource. And that's exactly what I want to incorporate into my design.»

What makes Dizami's work so effective is not the raised index finger. There is no sustainability sermon. Instead, he presents something so beautiful that you can't help but pause - and wonder why you never saw it from his perspective.

He doesn't know where the sold tables are today. «Maybe one of them is someone's coffee table. But with such a light-coloured surface, you can immediately see every coffee stain», he says with a grin. After finishing the last pieces, he first needed some distance. So much time, so many emotions - at some point you have to let go. Just like the paper he saved: It now lives its own life.

Pia Seidel

Senior Editor

Pia.Seidel@digitecgalaxus.ch

Like a cheerleader, I love celebrating good design and bringing you closer to everything furniture- and interior design- related. I regularly curate simple yet sophisticated interior ideas, report on trends and interview creative minds about their work.

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