Event date
-
Podsumowanie
The exhibition ‘People from the Porcelain Factory’ curated by anthropologist Ewa Klekot and ceramist Arkadiusz Szwed comes to Museum Europäischer Kulturen – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The exhibition, created on the initiative of Adam Mickiewicz Institute, is a collaboration with the Museum and the Polish Cultural Institute in Berlin.
Content
The exhibition People from the Porcelain Factory, featuring ‘The Human Trace’ tableware, was created by the anthropologist Ewa Klekot and the ceramist Arkadiusz Szwed as part of an ongoing project of the same name. The tableware set was produced on a factory production line by workers wearing gloves whose fingertips were dipped in cobalt salts. The traces of their touch remain almost invisible until firing, when they appear on the porcelain body, as the cobalt turns dark blue. In this way the porcelain tableware keeps the touch of the workers’ hands, revealing the role of the ‘human factor’ in industrial manufacturing. The set is the result of a collaboration between an anthropologist and a ceramist researching various types of knowledge used in the factory and the value of factory work.
Text
Smooth, shining porcelain evokes cleanliness and perfection. When fingers or lips have left a trace on a cup, we feel an almost compulsory need to wipe it off, eliminate, recover the perfection, and conceal the evidence of contact with the imperfect human form. We do not want to know if and how many times a cup has been touched before.
Author
Ewa Klekot, co-creator of the project
The set has been manufactured as a part of the project People from the Porcelain Factory carried out in one of the oldest ceramics factories in Poland. The factory in Ćmielów, established in 1790, has been active in fine porcelain production since 1838 and is currently owned by Polskie Fabryki Porcelany Ćmielów i Chodzież S.A. The project was financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education within the framework of the National Programme of Development in Humanities 2016-2018.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the sale of a book presenting the project run at the factory and photographs by Arkadiusz Szwed. The book, recently released by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, was created by the award-winning book designer, Kasia Kubicka.
The travelling exhibition People from the Porcelain Factory has successfully toured through Poland and the wider European area since 2017. It was presented at the Design March in Iceland (2017), Designblok in the Czech Republic (2017) and during the Triennial Ceramics UNICUM 2018 at the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana, at the Polish Cultural Institutes in Budapest and Sophia (2019) and at Helsinki Design Week and Kulttuurihalli in Finland (2020). The Human Trace tableware has also been shown at the renowned Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2019.
Source: press release