Day 1 – Give me a Revolution

June 27, 2024, 14pm-17pm

Hear Me Now!: American Political Jewelry 1965-1980

Cindi Strauss (USA)

Curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Author “Flux. American Jewelry and the Counterculture”

Losers' craft: amateurism as political gesture in Spain

Mònica Gaspar (ES)

Curator, writer, researcher and professor at the Lucerne School of Design, Cinema and Art.

For historical reasons, there are terms that acquire a dubious reputation and Artesania, “crafts” in Spanish, is one of them. During the Franco dictatorship (1939 – 1975), the production of traditional crafts was promoted in rural areas, as a financial incentive to prevent the population from moving to cities and, consequently, keep them away from social and industrial modernization. The objects of vernacular crafts were both beautiful and disturbing physical reminders of oppression. This same material culture manifested through utilitarian objects and architecture had already fascinated the first modernists, who found in that radical Mediterranean simplicity the inspiration for a formal revolution against academic styles. This talk will follow the change in the instrumentalization of crafts, both by the fascist regime and by the regime's critical positions on design. Since the country's democratization in the mid-1970s until today, contradictory perceptions persist regarding the political function of crafts. The second part of the talk will focus on the legacy of the “art of losers”, that is, on the anti-regime practices that emerged from that historical period of social defeat. The last part of the talk will suggest that an amateur aesthetic in contemporary design and jewelry has transformed the original gestures of militancy, resistance and protest into political proposals based on the principles of criticism, care and reparation.

Applying the self

Vivi Touloumidi (GR)

Contextual artist, researcher, and craftswoman. Her practice is embedded in artistic research at the intersections of art, cultural activism, and craft disciplines. A principal pursuit that investigates wearable and portable art as a medium of agency to carry sociopolitical messages, evoke discourse, and position a body in the public realm.

Day 2 - More than flowers

June 28, 2024, 14pm-17pm

The power of gold adornments

Rosa Maria Mota (PT)

Rosa Maria Mota holds a Phd in Heritage Studies, by the Portuguese Catholic University – School of the Arts (Magna cum Laude, 2013), under the theme Traditional gold Jewellry in the North of Portugal. The theme of her work is related to the study and dissemination of the traditional gold jewelly viewed under an artistic, economic, social and religious perspective

Carrying Images: Figures of Power between Support and Subversion

Toon Leën (BE)

PhD candidate, Hasselt University & PXL-MAD School of Arts, Hasselt, Belgium. Toon Leën (www.toonleen.com) studied painting at Sint Lucas Antwerp. His work moves between painting, video, and lecture performance. Recent projects include the lecture performance Personally, I’m Most Interested in the Shapes and Colours and an accompanying artist book of the same name (published by MER. Paper Kunsthalle in 2015); the concert lecture Correspondances mystérieuses, in collaboration with pianist Lucas Blondeel (2019–21); the short video Zwischen den Bildern (2020), and numerous lecture performances. His work is represented by Fred&Ferry Gallery in Antwerp.

At Dawn, Carnations are Incorruptible Jewels

Dionea Rocha Watt (BR)

Artist and writer. PhD at the Royal College of Art (Critical and Historical Studies). Born in Rio de Janeiro and have been based in England since 1994. An MA graduate from the Royal College of Art (Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery, 2009), with a background in design, contemporary jewellery and translation. Her PhD research examines the relationship between loss and artistic practice, and how this is reflected in the artist’s intimate engagement with materials and processes.

Day 3 – Radical Entanglements

June 29, 2024, 10am-30pm

Toxic Inheritances

Clementine Edwards (AUS)

Clementine Edwards is a Naarm Melbourne artist based in Rotterdam whose practice is led by sculpture and writing. Clementine's practice is oriented around material kinship, which thinks about the material beyond extraction and kinship beyond the nuclear family. It is the subject of the book The Material Kinship Reader, co-edited with Kris Dittel. Detail, scale and craftsmanship are integral to Clementine's work. Holding space for enchantment and its implications, she brings into the conversation the possibility of the glittering dream castle and the deep knowledge that the Disney story cannot exist without the working conditions, gender, and land that produced it. Clementine collectively produced the Climate Justice Code in 2023 and in 2022 she was a researcher at the Rietveld Academy in the Jewelery – Linking Bodies department. She has experience in publishing and goldsmithing.

The Fracture Network

Patrícia Domingues (PT)

Patricia Domingues obtained a Master of Arts from the University of Trier, Department of Gemstone and Jewelry Design in Idar-Oberstein, Germany, in 2013, and a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Hasselt and PXL-MAD School of Arts in 2022. Since 2009, he has participated in group and solo exhibitions across Europe and elsewhere. Her work has received several awards: New Traditional Jewelery in Amsterdam (2012), Talente Award in Munich (2014), Mari Funaki Award for Emerging Artist in Australia (2014) and Young Talent Prize from the European World Crafts Council in Belgium (2015). Currently, Domingues is a researcher at the Jewelery-Linking Bodies Department, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, where she investigates how artificial intelligence, metaverse worlds and digital structures shape the way humans think, while drastically reshaping the way landscapes are treated. Her main research focus involves exploring how technology lives through extractivism, dependent on mineral and geological sources.

Radical facilitation: a discussion

Ben Lignel (FR)

Ben Lignel is a jewelry designer with a passion for collective working and thinking about craft in expansive ways. He believes in 'people-driven initiatives' and sees his work at the intersection of 'many unresolved contradictions' that together make up his existential palette. As an educator and craft advocate, he is driven by an ethics of care, inclusion, and empowerment on the one hand, and critical analyses of social relations, and power distribution on the other hand. He sees his work lying somewhere between creative and analytical work which are always in dialogue and are not separate from each other. If given the opportunity, his dream would be to establish a free university for craft, cooking, and social justice in Montreuil, the suburban town in France where he resides, and which has a long tradition of political self-consciousness and activism.