To Sense is Human
12 Stone Garden at Homo Faber: Living Treasures of Europe and Japan (image: Alessandra Chemollo).
The 2022 edition of Homo Faber was an experience for all the senses. The artisan showcase biennial from the Michelangelo Foundation presented this year’s edition of its festival of craftsmanship on the theme of Living Treasures of Europe and Japan, from 10 April to 1 May 2022. As a multi-week-long celebration of craft and artisanal design held on Venice’s Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, a visual feast was always likely to be on the menu, but visitors in fact got to taste the whole sensory smorgasbord.
Birdsong trilling cheerfully from the foliage outside of Waiting in peace and darkness, a meditative exhibition by theatre director Robert Wilson, transpired to be part of a carefully crafted soundscape piped into the island’s landscape. In Blossoming Beauty, curated by designer Sylvain Roca, freshly cut flowers perfumed the air, blooming in hand-blown glass vases against a kaleidoscopic digital display. Giant bottles of AquaFlor Firenze reed diffuser room perfumes – in the custom scent Living Treasures – were tucked discreetly in corners. Even the onsite eatery offered a menu that promised diners could “experience the taste of art”. Of course, the visuals remained stunning, with rare pieces displayed in 15 exhibits against the grand backdrop of the historic San Giorgio Monastery, restored by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.
Blossoming Beauty curated by Sylvain Roca (image: Lola Moser).
Touching was verboten at most of the exhibits, as is understandable when displaying hand crafted ceramics, precious metals and fine textiles. But, perhaps pre-empting anyone who might feel like an antsy toddler after hours of being told not to touch the pretty things, Homo Faber had commissioned at least one exhibit where visitors could interact with the crafted designs. Curated by writer Tapiwa Matsinde, The Artisan was a fully functioning tea room where visitors were free to sit and run their hands over the many interior objects on display. Alongside its haptic qualities, The Artisan was also a demonstration that Homo Faber had not simply hit pause on its programme in the early years of the pandemic. Having debuted in 2018, the festival was originally scheduled to show Living Treasures in 2020. Event organisers, however, did not simply put the show on ice and bide their time until 2022; Matsinde was invited to create The Artisan well into in 2021. The addition of a young Black British woman to a lineup of curators that generally skewed somewhat male, pale and older was welcome.
The Artisan, curated by Tapiwa Matsinde (image: Alessandra Chemollo).
Design duo Giorgia Zanellato and Daniele Bortotto of Studio Zanellato/Bortotto also made the most of the two-year delay to refine their project: Tracing Venice. Their elaborate metal marquetry panels are echoes of the patterns found on the mosaic floor of Basilica di San Marco, recreated in 50 types of laser-cut and hand-polished metals. Special mention should go to the exhibition architecture, which used subtly shifting spotlights to make the metal pulse and glow in the dark corridor where they were displayed. The original polychromatic mosaics, created by the expert Byzantine mosaicists who carpeted the floor of the cathedral in marble patterns, were damaged in the 2019 storm. The low-lying lagoon city was devastated by the sea’s incursion, with 80 per cent of the city submerged below a high tide of 187cm. Two people died and some €2.2m of damage was caused to Basilica di San Marco, which sits at the city’s lowest point. Studio Zanellato/Bortotto hope that their designs can raise awareness of the threat. It takes a lifetime to hone a craft, but having younger designers clearly passionate about combining conservation and a call to climate action, all while marrying technology and traditional techniques, injected necessary energy. For all Venice’s ineffable glamour and craft heritage, it’s only getting harder to hold back the tides and storms supercharged by climate change.
Tracing Venice, by Studio Zanellato/Bortotto (image: Alessandra Chemollo).
Time and the passing of it was another sense stimulated by Living Treasures. Scientists have discovered our five assumed senses to be woefully incomplete, with recent studies suggesting human bodily senses could actually be as many as 20. In psychology, the field of chronoception is concerned with our ability to perceive and subjectively experience time. For me personally, the pandemic and the habits I developed during it has somewhat thrown my chronoception for a loop. It’s not so much the strange elastic quality time takes on when you spend extended periods in social isolation, so much as the penchant I developed for TikTok. Specifically, the kind of TikTok content where artists and craftspeople film their making process from start to finish then splice it together into a pleasing, instantly gratifying supercut that takes the viewer from raw material to finished piece in a matter of seconds. It’s unsurprisingly addictive and, as I realised watching the craftspeople demonstrating their work as part of Homo Faber 2022, it had inured me to the sheer amount of hours of labour that goes into each craft object. Watching a master craftsperson hand drawing the the pattern of a Chiso silk kimono on to paper, before it will be hand drawn again onto silk as part of fashion curator Judith Clark’s exhibit Details: Genealogies of Ornament offered a chance to recalibrate with the sheer amount of time poured into crafts by their practitioners.
The creation of a Chiso kimono at Judith Clark’s Details: Genealogies of Ornament (image: Riccardo Sanesi).
The passing of time took on elegiac note with Homo Faber 2022’s cornerstone exhibit, 12 Stone Garden. Curated by Naoto Fukasawa, the Japanese industrial designer renowned for his work for MUJI, and MOA Museum of Art curator Tokugo Uchida, 12 Stone Garden brought together the work of 12 Living National Treasures, the name given to Japanese artisans whose work to keep traditional crafts alive is officially recognised by the government. Fukasawa decided to display the works on low angular plinths created by taking the shape of a table, slicing it into smaller pieces, and exploding it so that visitors could see each item from every angle. The title is only held by the makers when they are still alive and practicing the craft; sadly, one such National Treasure, Takeshi Kitamura, died only a week before the postponed Homo Faber opened. Kitamura’s work is gorgeous and the chance to see it up close felt akin to an honour. He dedicated his weaving career to recreating ra, an extinct form of ancient Japanese gauze, backwards engineering the delicate technique from surviving fragments. Tragically, he left no students, and the craft will once again be lost to time.
Ra gauze woven by the late Takeshi Kitamura (image: Simone Padovani).
It would be remiss to not acknowledge that this story of Kitamura was narrated to me the textile artist Francesca Miotti, one of the event’s Young Ambassadors. This is an excellent programme, which recruits 100 young students and designers to act as exhibition guides. Rather than have to hunch over dense reams of exhibition text, visitors could strike up conversation with these enthusiastic and well informed helpers, all identifiable by the smart artists-smock style uniforms embroidered with rainbow text identifying their Young Ambassador status. Enamoured with the smocks, I asked around to find out who made them (and, perhaps, whether I could get my hands on one). The garments are provided by Makers Unite, an Amsterdam-based creative agency focusing on projects with a social mission. Alas, no-one would sell me their jacket, but the conversations with the Young Ambassadors were truly a highlight and a welcome chance to connect after a period of such prolonged isolation.
Tapiwa Matsinde in conversation with members of the Young Ambassadors (image: Nicolò Zanatta).
On top of the pandemic, other painful current events crowd in at the corners of all the beauty and charm, lending a bittersweet air to the proceedings. Homo Faber’s tagline is “crafting a more human future” but the newspaper pages are full of inhumanity as Russia continues its violent war on Ukraine and rising energy prices push vulnerable households to the brink. In the Next Faces of Europe, a jam-packed room curated by galleries Jean Blanchaert, there was an empty space on one of the myriad shelves that was supposed to display the work of Ukranian craftsperson Rustem Skybin. “The outbreak of war in Ukraine made it impossible to transport his work to Venice,” states a sign from the Michelangelo Foundation. “[We] decided to leave this space empty so that it can be filled with thoughts.” The war had also made it very hard for Japanese participants and press to attend as guests of honour, as their flights couldn’t pass through Russian airspace, forcing airlines to chart prohibitively lengthy detours.
Over on Murano, rising material costs are putting craftspeople under pressure. As part of its new In Città programme, Homo Faber put together itineraries for visitors to drop in at workshops of Venetian craftspeople throughout the city, including on the glassmaking island of Murano. Ongaro and Fuga, a family-run mirror silvering atelier spanning three generations of master craftspeople, is facing increasingly expensive prices for the industrial glass – the raw materials for their art – that they source from China and Germany. The family have decided to absorb the blow rather than raise prices for their clients, in the hope of better times ahead. Across a bridge at Wave Murano Glass, two of their five furnaces have been turned off – gas prices are simply too prohibitive now to keep them running. There is one furnace that they can afford to keep aflame – a one-of-a-kind custom design by Wave’s founder, Roberto Beltrami, that has a silver rocketship-style appendage. At just 30-years-old, Beltrami, who studied theoretical physics at Boston University, created a new system that allows for heat recapture, making the energy-intensive process of glass making more sustainable – and, given he economy, more cost-effective. Standing in the vast 1850s warehouse, feeling the heat from the furnace (thermoception, for those of you still keeping sensory count) there was, for all the anxieties, a sense of excitement for a more human future, too.
Words India Block
Photos courtesy of the Michelangelo Foundation