As a trained potter and ceramisist I am surrounded by the contradictions between the slow craft and the commercial productions to make a living from ceramics, the sudden hype surrounding ceramics, the irritation about the marketing of sustainability and storytelling and the actual desire for critical positions. When I moved to Emmental in 2002 to complete my pottery apprenticeship, I listened in disbelief as the senior potter told me how he was still able to sell his crockery hot from the kiln in the 1970s. Today, in 2025, ceramics as an artistic practice, like other arts and crafts, is once again attracting more attention and is simultaneously a hype that is doing well in late capitalist identitys. The hobby sector is booming, ceramics as the new yoga. Ceramics as a cultural asset has always been subject to rapidly changing conditions, from high culture to: «trop utilitaire, trop technique, trop terre à terre, trop accessible, trop naturelle, (et ainsi trop paysanne, romantique) pas assez conceptuelle pour certain:es, trop féminine pour d‘autres, pré-moderne et donc non contemporaine pour la pluspart» (Anne Dressen): too utilitarian, too technical, too down-to-earth, too accessible, too natural (and therefore too rural, too romantic), not conceptual enough for some, too feminine for others, pre-modern and therefore not contemporary for most. Questions about positioning or the refusal to position myself came up: what can ceramics tell us about origins? What about (post)colonial ceramic practices, how is appropriation dealt with? How does our digital access to knowledge change the transfer of knowledge about craft, what does this mean for «culture»? Who can learn ceramics and where, who dares to do so? What differences are there to consider, for example in terms of origin and gender (self-evidence)? What role play economic aspects - is it really just a «luxury good»? For whom is it produced? How do ceramic spaces position themselves, what (social) roles do they have? Where do the raw materials come from, how are they handled? When is ceramics a collective craft (use of infrastructure and access to resources/pottery villages and signature)?
Based on my first, open working title «ceramics and politics», I was concerned with the values and the different roles that ceramics play in societies. Where do ceramics appear in current discourses and everyday situations, how are their stories told and how are they to be understood? I have found Claude Lévi-Strauss‘ book, «La potière jalouse» (The Jealous Potterwoman), in which he compares myths of the two so-called Americas. Lévi-Strauss uses the myths examined to emphasise jealousy as an emotion or character trait associated with ceramics, which also has female connotations. «The close relationship that manifests itself in these myths between the invention of pottery, the marital quarrel and a three-level cosmos (above/below/on earth) is unravelled by a combinatorial logic and leads us directly to the terrain of Freud.» Together with the vessels, I have circled around many stories and narratives about bodies, vessels, emotions, attributions, symbolic images, idioms (e.g. pregnant women as pots), clay bodies, creation myths, naturalisation processes, from the beginnings of culture. Ceramics as a complex craft that requires a lot of time and knowledge, as a craft that is inseparably shaped and characterized by the material as such, the clay as an actor and their phonic substance. This led me to question what all these «attributions» produce.