Author: Ruby Jewel

Morgane de Klerk – Connecting Device 

A presentation based on personal and collaborative works, illustrating steps made to mutate jewellery into a more inclusive and connecting ‘device’.

Morgane de Klerk sees research, curatorial experiences and physical works as complementary aspects in her practice.
Her work deals with the social aspect of jewellery and is deeply rooted in the observation of our daily surrounding.
She curated the group exhibitions Gold, Butter & Ripe Lemons (Paris, 2013), Subliminal (Amsterdam, 2014) and Shine & Reflect (Paris, Munich, Amsterdam, 2017-18) and took part in the biennale Triple Parade in Shanghai in 2018.
She is also co-initiator of Studio 3000 (with Benedikt Fischer and Julia Walter), of the collective KasaneYô (with Nina Sajet, Gitte Nygaard and Q Hisashi Shibata) and most recently co-founder of The Pool with 14 other jewelers in Amsterdam.

Q Hisashi Shibata: Survival with honesty

Q Hisashi Shibata is an artist and designer His practice has developed around rituals and social encounters mediated through fashion, jewellery and food. He states that our perception of the landscape is formed through what and how we  wear and eat, and the way we transform / take care of our environment is a direct outcome of that perception. By setting up extraordinary and aesthetically challenging social gatherings around  Jewelry , outfit and food, he facilitates dialogue and triggers a collective re-designing of our  outfits & eating habits .In a hype sensory way, Q shows that all it takes is a little bit of social imagination to re-think fundamental aspects of our culture.

Morgane and Hisashi collaborated on multiple projects, within KasaneYô or at The Pool — Amsterdam Jewellery Collective, notably.The first collective started from a governmental project to innovate with Japanese cultured pearls; while the second one is a new self-owned jewellery shop in the center of Amsterdam. Both contexts are pretexts to make new works aligned with environmental issues and market value.

On Material Kinship: Fossilised Lives, Queer Plastics & Jewellery Magic
Lecture Synopsis:  Clementine Edwards will present a poetic essay that introduces her artistic research material kinship and trace its ‘family’ lineage, which predates both her gold and silversmithing studies and her own birth. Material kinship is interested in complicating notions of kinship beyond the normative or biological, and complicating notions of material beyond the non-sentient. 

Clementine Edwards is a Rotterdam-based artist whose practice is led by sculpture. Her work looks at how certain experiences and relationships might be enriched and expanded through material, and at the reproductive potential of non-sentient materials. Her ongoing research line is material kinship, which she locates in the context of climate colonialism. Despite ‘difficult’ subject matter, her artworks invite intimacy via detail, story, and precariousness. In 2021 Clementine will publish The Material Kinship Reader,co-edited with Kris Dittel. clementineedwards.com