Cristina Filipe, ed. Chilly Sweat Suor Frio: 1st Lisbon Up to date Jewelry Biennial. Lisbon: PIN – Associação Portuguesa de Joalharia Contemporânea/Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa – Museu de São Roque/Câmara Municipal Lisboa, MUDE – Museu do Design e da Moda, Coleção Francisco Capelo/Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Faculty of Arts, CITAR- Analysis Centre for Science and Expertise of the Arts, 2022.
In up to date jewellery, the place the dominant type of publication continues to be the self-congratulating artist’s monograph, a e book like Chilly Sweat Suor Frio provides a welcome alternative to consider jewellery as a posh social phenomenon past the maker’s perspective. This publication is the printed legacy of the first Lisbon Up to date Jewellery Biennial, a public occasion that included exhibitions, colloquia, and masterclasses in varied venues throughout Lisbon (September 16–November 20, 2021). It introduced collectively 268 individuals from 24 nationalities, together with artists, gallerists, writers, educators, and collectors.
The publication instantly engages the reader with the Biennial’s theme, chilly sweat. This uncomfortable feeling of bodily and religious vulnerability reigned within the wake of the 2020 pandemic’s outbreak. Cristina Filipe, president of PIN – Portuguese Affiliation for Up to date Jewellery till January 28, 2023, served as the overall curator of the biennial, and was additionally chargeable for the idea of the e book and its editorial coordination. The thematic core of the Biennial and its ensuing e book bears Filipe’s hallmark angle towards jewellery, which locations up to date inventive apply in transhistorical and transcultural dialogues with different artefacts. Books recall different books, and I can’t assist however set up a relationship with the exhibition catalog Mais Perto—Nearer, which she curated with Marilia Maria Mira and Paula Paour in 2005. The exhibition introduced up to date jewellery in dialogue with the collections of the Nationwide Museum of Historic Artwork in Lisbon as a part of the Ars Ornata Europeana worldwide jewellery convention. Filipe and a gaggle of like-minded jewelers based PIN to arrange that occasion.
With the current publication and handing over of PIN’s presidency to Marta Costa Reis, Filipe appears to shut a circle. The publication bears witness to PIN’s long-standing collaborations with Portuguese cultural stakeholders, itemizing a powerful variety of museum and tutorial establishments, galleries, artists, and media protection partnerships.
The Chilly Sweat publication accomplishes a number of roles without delay. It paperwork the title exhibition in its varied places. It showcases gorgeous works of up to date jewellery and historic artefacts. It gathers the papers given on the colloquia. And, lastly, it’s a treasured object, fastidiously designed and lavishly illustrated.
In sensible phrases, the e book is split into two elements: the exhibitions and the colloquia.
The e book as a walkable area
The e book’s first half walks the reader by the multi-site exhibition Chilly Sweat Suor Frio, curated by Cristina Filipe and the Jesuit priest João Norton de Matos SJ, deployed throughout 4 venues: the Church of São Roque, its museum and short-term exhibitions gallery, and the Museu da Farmácia. Every chapter paperwork a location and is launched by the curatorial textual content. These introductions take the reader by the hand on an in depth and evocative tour by the exhibition rooms, revealing the inspiration behind the dialogues established between inventive works and historic artifacts, similar to foundling tokens from the Misericordia Home, relics, amulets from non-Western traditions, or pharmaceutical substances.
The texts additionally share particulars about curatorial selections, interpret up to date works, or take the reader behind the scenes to elucidate technical challenges that had been met, for instance, when designing the show for the Treasured Crown of Our Girl of Fatima, which appeared to drift within the void. Full-page portraits of some taking part artists sporting their work shock the reader like an apparition. They pose quietly, photographed like Baroque holy figures towards a darkish background.
This aesthetic is intentional and helps the Biennial’s quest to discover the seldom-explored intersection between design and faith, artwork, and spirituality. The beneficiant graphic structure indulges within the documentation of the excellent settings of the exhibitions, be they golden altars and ornamented marble partitions or white-cube installations.
With Eduardo Sousa Ribeiro’s wonderful pictures, the ambiance of the exhibitions turns into breathable, capturing the general public’s fleeting interactions with the works. On the identical time, close-ups of the jewellery items permit concentrated commentary as they appear to leap off the web page. The particular jewellery perspective of this publication counters the prejudices towards decoration, emotion, and perception that trendy legacies proceed to perpetuate within the context of instructional establishments, museum collections, or publications.
The checklist with the technical particulars of about 220 up to date works by 72 worldwide artists from completely different disciplines—largely jewellery, but in addition pictures, sculpture, design, movie, and efficiency—turns into a beneficial instrument for future referencing. Regardless that typically it’s troublesome to search out the correlation between the illustration quantity, web page location, and object data, the additional effort is value investing in. An eagle eye is required, and in addition some urgent and pulling, to dig up some picture captions which are tucked virtually into the e book’s gutter.
Documenting the Biennial as a shifting goal
Appearing as a hinge between the exhibition and the colloquia part, the Biennial’s program is documented within the middle pages of the publication. There, every occasion (be it a present, masterclass, colloquium, or different form of occasion) is represented by a truth sheet and headed by a thumbnail picture of the flyer, banner, or web site used for its communication. I wish to consider that the exhibition guidelines from the publication Exhibits and Tales: On Jewellery Exhibition-Making (AJF, 2015) may need contributed to elevating consciousness in regards to the significance of documenting exhibitions extra systematically.
But it might have been a deal with if these few pages had recorded the biennial’s program extra visually. Borrowing one single web page from some place else (there are 448 pages to select from) would have allowed the editors to incorporate some photographs exhibiting the Biennial’s ambiance open air: the gang that shaped outdoors the Museo de San Roque to attend the inaugural speech; the gatherings throughout the openings in different places; some impressions of the masterclass workshops; a view of the Jewellery Room, the place worldwide galleries had their stands; or the Biennial’s strong presence within the public area, from road banners to lightboxes within the subway station.
Up to date jewellery in transhistorical perspective
The e book’s second half gathers a group of 13 papers, held throughout the two colloquia and a closing lecture. The format follows that of educational proceedings, offering an summary and key phrases to introduce every article. The invited authors come from varied disciplines, together with artwork historical past, philosophy, theology, gemology, and anthropology. The papers from the primary colloquium mirrored on the biennial themes, Physique, Concern, and Safety, from a perspective of up to date artwork practices and addressed the circumstances of manufacturing and use of jewellery, previous and current. Readers will likely be conversant in the works put beneath scrutiny, similar to Liesbeth den Besten’s evaluation of Lauren Kalman’s work.
The identical readers would possibly really feel challenged when encountering the papers from the second colloquium, “Treasured Crown.” There, the three gathered essays elaborate on devotional jewellery and non secular goldsmithing. Resulting from their specificity and in some circumstances dryness, they won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. On the identical time I appreciated the braveness of publishing them inside a recent jewellery publication, inviting the specialised neighborhood to beat their usually miopic self-referentiality and be interested in different intervals and practices. The astonishing story of the Treasured Crown of Our Girl of Fatima displayed within the Chilly Sweat exhibition is a working example.
This crown was product of treasured metals and gems sourced from jewellery that Portuguese ladies gifted to the church, hoping that their providing to the Virgin Mary would shield their sons from becoming a member of the second world battle, within the Nineteen Forties. That is how a neighborhood offered the fabric sources to craft a treasured object as a way to categorical a political message. Right now we’d name it craftivism. In 1981 a correlation was made between the miraculous apparition of Our Girl of Fatima and Pope John II’s survival after an assassination try on his life. The projectile faraway from the Pope’s physique was built-in into the crown as if it had been another treasured gem. Physique, worry, and safety soften collectively on this anecdote and present that conceptualism and the usage of the “objet trouvé” should not unique to the up to date jewellery subject.
Launching the e book
Since its publication in November 2022, PIN has organized a number of occasions to launch the e book. Probably the most significant and emotionally loaded presentation was the primary one, which passed off on November 5, 2022, at Brotéria’s Sala dos Couros, in Lisbon.
Subsequent to representatives of all taking part establishments, Kadri Mälk (who died not lengthy after) traveled to Lisbon to personally current the e book. Professor Emeritus of the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Mälk was in some ways connected to Portugal. The title of the Biennial, Chilly Sweat Suor Frio, was impressed by the scary expertise that Filipe and Mälk, two shut pals, shared in Munich throughout Schmuck 2020. That assembly got here abruptly to an finish as everybody was urged to return to their respective international locations, simply hours earlier than the beginning of the lockdown, in an environment of worry and uncertainty.
The latest e book presentation passed off in Munich throughout Jewellery Week 2023, the place every little thing started. A Chilly Sweat Ampoule, to be worn on the physique and made by Christoph Zellweger in a restricted version, accompanied the e book’s launch there. It options the e book’s cowl and is on the market on the market.
Why documenting exhibitions issues
This superbly crafted publication has documented the first Lisbon Up to date Jewellery Biennial. Curating exhibitions is an efficient medium for creating discourse in up to date jewellery and for bodily constructing plural jewellery histories. That’s why documenting exhibitions turns into so essential. With its conceptual rigor, aesthetic energy, and interdisciplinary method, this e book makes a beneficial contribution to the skilled subject as a lot as the tutorial one. The e book encourages additional analysis about what it means to be human as we speak and proves that jewellery is a strong medium to consider survival and perception in unsure occasions.
