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Claudia Casali traduzione conferenza pechino 2020
2020-11-12
Dear Friends, Dear Colleagues,
I hope you are all fine.
I would like to thank IAC for this opportunity of exchange of ideas and impressions.
Talking about New Trend of ceramic art today in Europe is a very complex topic.
The pandemic situation has changed the whole system of relationships and collaborations. This meeting is
an example in this regard.
Many projects have been suspended and cancelled; many international competitions (I am thinking of our
Faenza Prize or the Japanese Mino Competition) have been postponed to a future yet to be defined.
Museums are obliged to be closed and to change day by day the future programs. This is causing a further
big stress on the artists too.
I don’t know what will our program in Faenza for next year…
The art world has never stopped working, both in the months of complete lockdown and in the following
months.
I am talking about artists but also about museums and galleries, with their online presentations.
As museums and cultural operators, we have asked a lot of artists in terms of testimonies and we have
taken advantage of their generosity in the darkest moment of our recent history.
Of course, as said, the ways of fruition have changed, without openings and with limited presences.
We have tried to build and share systems of virtual collaborations and interactions, sometimes with a
certain audience response.
Specifically, our museum has proposed webinars to support young creatives, within a European project
Cerdee - Interreg, to promote young entrepreneurs, designers, artists and ceramists. A way to support
creativity in this difficult moment.
In these months I had the opportunity to participate in different project sharing.
Many artists have relied on the web to tell their work. Others have disappeared and then returned to the
web after the crucial months of lockdown, where they reflected and worked in a different way, sometimes
changing their way of working.
I noticed how there was a strong need to work on drawing, color, painting on ceramics (Roma, Corbett,
Wenzel) or create installations where the sign stroke interacts with the sculpture.
Another significant theme was the environment, the preservation of the planet and its memory, the
urgency of the environment. Many installations have worked on this and the clay is a perfect language that
helps to express itself in this sense (Casasempere, Andreatta Calò).
Much has been expressed about the fragmentary nature of everyday life and its fragility, both in art and
design (Dominguez, Anastasio, Morrow).
As well as comments and questioning of elements related to beliefs, ideologies, religion, identity (Yves
Malfiet, David Casini).
It is frequent an approach and synergy with the other arts. As we know, Covid has heavily penalized
performing artists (musicians, dancers, actors) on all levels. Where possible, museums have provided alternative spaces to cinemas and theatres, especially in the
summer months.
But the artists themselves devised joint projects in which a performative discourse was linked to sculptural
or pictorial work. A new way of viewing and interpreting the ceramic work, through the gestures of the
performative movement.
I am thinking of the work presented at Corvi Mora Gallery in London.
Or even here in Italy the artist Alessandro Roma and the dancer Paola Ponti who created works and
interpreted the discomfort of the moment, with its new expressive needs.
Sarah Fraser has presented a social work with women and immigrants at the British Biennale this year.
Putting together art laboratories and social disease was a priority for many artists and community (in our
case, in Faenza, we used the restoration laboratory with the kintsugi technique to work together with
women abused or with familiar problems of violence).
What was really missing in these months was the dialogue in presence, the sharing of spaces, the
realization of cultural exchange residences that are a source of cultural growth without any equal.
Big event like Argillà, the European festival of ceramics, supposed to be last September in Faenza, was
cancelled, leaving 250 European ceramic workshop without a place of meeting and of course of selling. We
are not sure to be able to organize it next 2021.
Fortunately some Governments gave some economical support to the artists and to the museums. Last
week our Ministry of Culture published a call for project for buying pieces to insert in the contemporary
collections of the Italian museums, thus giving a support to many artists in difficulties.
Networking and participation systems have been activated at local, national and European level. The
sharing network is fundamental and this meeting is a testimony of this.
We hope to return to a normality, which, I believe, will never be equal to the precovid one for all the social
and human consequences it has entailed.
Art has been always able to reflect the society and its time and to help in the moments of difficulties.
Let’s try to make culture and art a way of preserving us from the many brutalities of the moment.
Thank you for your attention