Jivan Astfalck
Jivan Astfalck is a visual artist, jeweller and academic. Born in Berlin, where she trained as a goldsmith, she has been living in London for more than 30 years, while returning to Berlin on a regular basis. She earned her PhD in Fine Art at the University of the Arts London and is now Professor Emerita at Birmingham City University (BCU), where she previously taught at the world-renowned School of Jewellery.
Prof. Astfalck combines her studio practice, which she exhibits internationally, with teaching projects and creative development & management of projects like Polyphonous, Whispers&Cries, and kittenhair.
Her focus and research interests are in using hermeneutic philosophy, literary theory and other appropriate thought models as tools to investigate narrative structures embedded in body related crafts objects. In her view, the convergence of crafts, design and fine art practices is conducive to extending the theoretical vocabulary and map out new territories where crafts practices contribute to cultural production and dissemination.
“Jewellery for me is unique expression of embedded and g(c)rafted narrative, intimately related to the body - both, sensually and intellectually.”
Prof. Astfalck combines her studio practice, which she exhibits internationally, with teaching projects and creative development & management of projects like Polyphonous, Whispers&Cries, and kittenhair.
Her focus and research interests are in using hermeneutic philosophy, literary theory and other appropriate thought models as tools to investigate narrative structures embedded in body related crafts objects. In her view, the convergence of crafts, design and fine art practices is conducive to extending the theoretical vocabulary and map out new territories where crafts practices contribute to cultural production and dissemination.
“Jewellery for me is unique expression of embedded and g(c)rafted narrative, intimately related to the body - both, sensually and intellectually.”
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In this, the third volume of Zetesis, a neatly packaged Molotov was launched into the ‘out-there’ of art, of science and of life in the disguised form of an international call for papers.
We were curious if there might be a different way to re-think/re-make the links between and amongst speculation, materiality, performativity, the senses and sensualities, with bodies both real and imagined, without having to resort to the somewhat staid methodologies of “dialectical materialism” or “objected oriented ontologies” or the seemingly overrated metrics of “scientistic deduction.” Recognising, at the same time, that we were riding the wave of a massive, revolutionary paradigm shift brought on by advances in complexity, radical materiality and the quanta, quarks and feedback loops, robotics, artificial intelligences, transsexualities and ecological verisimilitude our task could not have been more urgent.
The Call went out. But rather than ask for a direct or literal response to this ‘re-think/re-make’, the collective chose instead to journey onto a slightly more dangerous, curious path, one not usually linked with formal research, but instead cast often as frivolous or whimsical, illusionary, religious or just plain wrong. We chose to partner with the wild side and take a stronger look-see at the forerunners to all contemporary art, philosophy and science; to wit: magic, alchemy and the transubstantiation of the senses.
Under the illusive cloak of magic, the curiosity of alchemists introduced a means for experimentation into the innate properties of materials. The transformation of raw matter into precious metals, the combination of hot sulphur and wet, cold mercury to birth the philosopher’s stone; to bring the inanimate to life, to vanish miraculously and conjure the body, as well as providing a foundation for the laws of substance based on sensory interaction and its potentiality. The scientific practices of today echo this inherent desire for material vitally ‘alive’ transformations, yet Western tradition remains cautious of unreasoned sensorial data, often treating it with trepidation. While this paradigm has proven an efficient methodology, it has installed a discriminatory partition between that which can be rationalised or mathematized and that which is supposedly ‘only’ sensory.
These energised and sensate transformations mark the beginning of a new challenge against tradition, returning to curiosity, experimentation and the intensity of the senses away from conventional modes of thought.
The Centre for Fine Art Research (CFAR) and the Research Centre for Creative Making (S.T.U.F.F.) based at the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media (ADM) joined forces at Birmingham School of Art – BCU to welcome papers/ performances/exhibition installations that responded to magic/alchemic practices in all their forms, including but not limited to the origins of alchemy and its contemporary relevance in science, magic performance, illusion, automata, the sensory in artificial intelligence and radical thinking in relation to concepts of time. We invited artists, scientists and philosophers to explore again the threshold between these paradigms, dwelling on curiosity and the tradition of scientific questioning.
This bold and viscerally complex conference, laid the groundwork for this volume 3 of Zetesis: Twice Upon a Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the senses. The exhibitions, artwork, papers and prose contained in this volume include some of the best international practice-led and theoretically emboldened research on this topic today.
By foregrounding the alchemist’s vision, we now present here in Zetesis our initial findings: a profane renegotiation of the very boundaries that seemed heretofore always insistent upon separating into binaric unities the so-called texture-realities of representation vs thought, sensation vs logic, image vs text. In challenging those easy divisions, we celebrate the (re-)turn to a ‘twice upon a time’ when transubstantiation, metamorphosis and morphogenesis gives succour to this energy we so nonchalantly call art.
Johnny Golding
Drawing on historical and autobiographical material, fiction and fairy tales, a series of body-related crafts objects have been produced that tell hybrid, fantastical stories. These objects are enigmatic, yet suggestive of the wounds of history and of the trauma and healing processes that are part of our relationships with others. The work is understood as a mnemonic device created to evoke the complexities and webs of relationships, which exist between the various levels of interpretative investments that would otherwise be un-containable.
The exploration of the notion of metaphor within a semantic context is here adapted to facilitate new understanding of the metaphorical qualities found in creative and narrative craft objects. Metaphoricity can be regarded as a way of cross-mapping the conceptual system of one area of experience and terminology with another, suggesting a coherent system created for understanding knowledge in terms of critical reflection, and being conducive to new creative articulation and representation. In the work theory emerges as a dynamic encounter, a continuous re-figuration within a tradition of commentary and interpretation.
Researched ideas, practical work and developing studio methodology have been explored further and tested in exhibitions, written publications, conference contributions, teaching projects and artists residencies. A large body of practical work has been generated over the period of the research. Some of the objects are pieces of jewellery, using precious metals and other more idiosyncratic materials. Other objects, even though still wearable, extend the boundaries of the traditional piece of jewellery towards what has become a fine art practice, which uses a multi-media approach together with traditional handcraft goldsmithing skills. Assemblage, installation, video and relational interactive projects have been developed to investigate narrative structures invested in those objects.
(2) The JUNK jewellery was broken or unserviceable jewellery gifted to the project by a number of partnered charities, who in return received a percentage of the profits made from the redesigned pieces created as a result. For more about the project visit www.rubbishtogold.com (3) Kant, I. (2004: 23) Book II. Analytic of the Sublime, Section I. Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement, in The Critique of Judgement, available at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/index.html
Our paper investigates issues concerning the conceptual development and operational intricacies towards staging JUNK: rubbish to gold, a performative and participatory installation project, which is motivated by social and ecological concerns, questioning the intrinsic value of design and the value of recycled and upcycled materials. The project aims to experiment with innovative and collaborative design methodologies and a playful exploration of ideas of community economies and associated activities of exchange, bartering, gathering, earning, harvesting and giving.
In today’s society when we think of re-using we imagine the recycling of packaging and unwanted consumer objects, we think of the up-cycling of consumer leftovers into a new and desirable luxury, but we do not however think very often about the changing status of the object and the relation between monetary value and design value. In our visually biased society we focus on the object, the material. Recycling sees conversion of one object to another, ideally from unwanted to desired, but mostly in terms of new consumer product ready to buy. JUNK: rubbish to gold seeks to shake this presumption through making the entire process of creation the ‘work of art’, from material selection to (re)construction, the focus is shifted from the object to the social interactions and agency usually hiding behind it.
In our contemporary and increasingly global culture we tend to regard attempts to re-connect with a personal or cultural point of origin as nostalgic; we find ourselves much more in a world of shifting, flexible frameworks in which our origins, bonds, traditions, our sentiments and dreams, exist alongside other stories, other fragments of memory and traces of time. In such a world a creative practitioner can be regarded as a voyager, a person on a journey wandering or more likely meandering through the world of appearances, ideas, theories and histories. The abandonment of a carefully constructed cultural identity can be regarded as identity itself, as much as making can become heterogeneous, counter-historical and hybrid. On the other side of the spectrum we find objects, invested with ‘conserving’ and archival values, sometimes motivated by utopian ideals and often by the passionate investment in the idea that objects have invested meaning.
In this, the third volume of Zetesis, a neatly packaged Molotov was launched into the ‘out-there’ of art, of science and of life in the disguised form of an international call for papers.
We were curious if there might be a different way to re-think/re-make the links between and amongst speculation, materiality, performativity, the senses and sensualities, with bodies both real and imagined, without having to resort to the somewhat staid methodologies of “dialectical materialism” or “objected oriented ontologies” or the seemingly overrated metrics of “scientistic deduction.” Recognising, at the same time, that we were riding the wave of a massive, revolutionary paradigm shift brought on by advances in complexity, radical materiality and the quanta, quarks and feedback loops, robotics, artificial intelligences, transsexualities and ecological verisimilitude our task could not have been more urgent.
The Call went out. But rather than ask for a direct or literal response to this ‘re-think/re-make’, the collective chose instead to journey onto a slightly more dangerous, curious path, one not usually linked with formal research, but instead cast often as frivolous or whimsical, illusionary, religious or just plain wrong. We chose to partner with the wild side and take a stronger look-see at the forerunners to all contemporary art, philosophy and science; to wit: magic, alchemy and the transubstantiation of the senses.
Under the illusive cloak of magic, the curiosity of alchemists introduced a means for experimentation into the innate properties of materials. The transformation of raw matter into precious metals, the combination of hot sulphur and wet, cold mercury to birth the philosopher’s stone; to bring the inanimate to life, to vanish miraculously and conjure the body, as well as providing a foundation for the laws of substance based on sensory interaction and its potentiality. The scientific practices of today echo this inherent desire for material vitally ‘alive’ transformations, yet Western tradition remains cautious of unreasoned sensorial data, often treating it with trepidation. While this paradigm has proven an efficient methodology, it has installed a discriminatory partition between that which can be rationalised or mathematized and that which is supposedly ‘only’ sensory.
These energised and sensate transformations mark the beginning of a new challenge against tradition, returning to curiosity, experimentation and the intensity of the senses away from conventional modes of thought.
The Centre for Fine Art Research (CFAR) and the Research Centre for Creative Making (S.T.U.F.F.) based at the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media (ADM) joined forces at Birmingham School of Art – BCU to welcome papers/ performances/exhibition installations that responded to magic/alchemic practices in all their forms, including but not limited to the origins of alchemy and its contemporary relevance in science, magic performance, illusion, automata, the sensory in artificial intelligence and radical thinking in relation to concepts of time. We invited artists, scientists and philosophers to explore again the threshold between these paradigms, dwelling on curiosity and the tradition of scientific questioning.
This bold and viscerally complex conference, laid the groundwork for this volume 3 of Zetesis: Twice Upon a Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the senses. The exhibitions, artwork, papers and prose contained in this volume include some of the best international practice-led and theoretically emboldened research on this topic today.
By foregrounding the alchemist’s vision, we now present here in Zetesis our initial findings: a profane renegotiation of the very boundaries that seemed heretofore always insistent upon separating into binaric unities the so-called texture-realities of representation vs thought, sensation vs logic, image vs text. In challenging those easy divisions, we celebrate the (re-)turn to a ‘twice upon a time’ when transubstantiation, metamorphosis and morphogenesis gives succour to this energy we so nonchalantly call art.
Johnny Golding
Drawing on historical and autobiographical material, fiction and fairy tales, a series of body-related crafts objects have been produced that tell hybrid, fantastical stories. These objects are enigmatic, yet suggestive of the wounds of history and of the trauma and healing processes that are part of our relationships with others. The work is understood as a mnemonic device created to evoke the complexities and webs of relationships, which exist between the various levels of interpretative investments that would otherwise be un-containable.
The exploration of the notion of metaphor within a semantic context is here adapted to facilitate new understanding of the metaphorical qualities found in creative and narrative craft objects. Metaphoricity can be regarded as a way of cross-mapping the conceptual system of one area of experience and terminology with another, suggesting a coherent system created for understanding knowledge in terms of critical reflection, and being conducive to new creative articulation and representation. In the work theory emerges as a dynamic encounter, a continuous re-figuration within a tradition of commentary and interpretation.
Researched ideas, practical work and developing studio methodology have been explored further and tested in exhibitions, written publications, conference contributions, teaching projects and artists residencies. A large body of practical work has been generated over the period of the research. Some of the objects are pieces of jewellery, using precious metals and other more idiosyncratic materials. Other objects, even though still wearable, extend the boundaries of the traditional piece of jewellery towards what has become a fine art practice, which uses a multi-media approach together with traditional handcraft goldsmithing skills. Assemblage, installation, video and relational interactive projects have been developed to investigate narrative structures invested in those objects.
(2) The JUNK jewellery was broken or unserviceable jewellery gifted to the project by a number of partnered charities, who in return received a percentage of the profits made from the redesigned pieces created as a result. For more about the project visit www.rubbishtogold.com (3) Kant, I. (2004: 23) Book II. Analytic of the Sublime, Section I. Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement, in The Critique of Judgement, available at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16j/index.html
Our paper investigates issues concerning the conceptual development and operational intricacies towards staging JUNK: rubbish to gold, a performative and participatory installation project, which is motivated by social and ecological concerns, questioning the intrinsic value of design and the value of recycled and upcycled materials. The project aims to experiment with innovative and collaborative design methodologies and a playful exploration of ideas of community economies and associated activities of exchange, bartering, gathering, earning, harvesting and giving.
In today’s society when we think of re-using we imagine the recycling of packaging and unwanted consumer objects, we think of the up-cycling of consumer leftovers into a new and desirable luxury, but we do not however think very often about the changing status of the object and the relation between monetary value and design value. In our visually biased society we focus on the object, the material. Recycling sees conversion of one object to another, ideally from unwanted to desired, but mostly in terms of new consumer product ready to buy. JUNK: rubbish to gold seeks to shake this presumption through making the entire process of creation the ‘work of art’, from material selection to (re)construction, the focus is shifted from the object to the social interactions and agency usually hiding behind it.
In our contemporary and increasingly global culture we tend to regard attempts to re-connect with a personal or cultural point of origin as nostalgic; we find ourselves much more in a world of shifting, flexible frameworks in which our origins, bonds, traditions, our sentiments and dreams, exist alongside other stories, other fragments of memory and traces of time. In such a world a creative practitioner can be regarded as a voyager, a person on a journey wandering or more likely meandering through the world of appearances, ideas, theories and histories. The abandonment of a carefully constructed cultural identity can be regarded as identity itself, as much as making can become heterogeneous, counter-historical and hybrid. On the other side of the spectrum we find objects, invested with ‘conserving’ and archival values, sometimes motivated by utopian ideals and often by the passionate investment in the idea that objects have invested meaning.