1ª Bienal de Joalharia Contemporânea de Lisboa

Nanna Melland, 1969. Photography: Morten Brun

Filomena Silvano. Photography: Rights reserved. Cortesy Filomena Silvano

Filomena Silvano. Photo: Rights reserved. Cortesy Filomena Silvano.

Nanna Melland, 1969. Photography: Morten Brun

BIENNIAL CLOSING CEREMONY

STORIES OF JEWELLERY FROM THE NORTH

Lecture Nanna Melland (NO)

19 November, Friday
18h

Brotéria

MASK, PROTECTION AND ELEGANCE

Lecture Denis Bruna (FR)

20 November, Saturday

15h

Brotéria

WE WEAR CLOTHES TO BECOME HUMAN. BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

Lecture Filomena Silvano
20 November, Saturday
16h

Brotéria

TRIBUTE TO VALERIA VALLARTA SIEMELINK

Hes Siemelink

20 November, Saturday
17h
Brotéria

BIENNIAL CLOSING
Cristina Filipe
20 November, Saturday
17h30

Brotéria

Flyer Lecture Filomena Silvano

Flyer Lecture Nanna Melland
Closing Flyer

All the events

Slide

JEWELLERY STORIES FROM THE NORTH

This lecture will take you on a journey to one of Europe’s darkest corners: Norway. A land of Vikings and the indigenous Sami, it is a country of huge natural contrasts that shift between dark and cold to light-filled insomniac summers.

Warm clothes will protect you from the cold, but there is no protection from the darkness. It will seep into your mind like a thick fog. As nature hibernates, people try their best to make it through the winter. It is not an exercise for beginners. For most Norwegians, it is a lifelong challenge.

Under these conditions, a small but thriving community of jewellery makers create their work alongside Norway’s other creative expressions such as its famed black metal bands, the poet Henrik Ibsen, the painter Edvard Munch, and the queen of contemporary jewellery, Tone Vigeland. The darkness and cold are certainly a powerful force for creativity, as magical as the colours of the Aurora Borealis pulsating in the sky!

NANNA MELLAND (1969, Oslo, Norway) holds degrees from the Academy of Fine arts in Munich, a master’s degree from the University of Oslo in Social Anthropology and History of Religion, and is a journeyman goldsmith. In 2017 Melland was guest professor at Burg Gibichenstein in Halle, Germany, and is now based in Oslo, Norway.
In 2008 Melland received the Norwegian Craft prize. She works with various materials and explores a wide variety of subject matter, including intrauterine devices (IUDs), gold nails, cast pigs’ hearts, orchids in lead, aluminium airplanes and atom bomb rings in tin. Despite its eclecticism, her work paradoxically attains a coherent whole, and is represented in Nordenfjeldske Arts and Craft museum in Trondheim, Norway.
Melland has taken part in many group and solo exhibitions in museum and galleries around the world, including at the Pinakotek Moderne in Munich, the Schmuck fair, the Museum of Modern Art in Arnheim, the Paris Museum of Modern Art, the Jewellery Museum in Pforzheim, the New York Museum of Arts and Design, and The Dowse Art Museum in New Zealand.

Slide

THE MASK, PROTECTION AND ELEGANCE In order to limit the risks of spreading Covid-19, we were all obliged to wear a mask. In some countries, such as France, the difficulty of obtaining surgical masks at the beginning of the pandemic led to the home-made production of cloth masks. When masks became readily available, shops, museum shops, and many websites offered masks made from fabrics with various colours and patterns to contrast with the uniformity and sad appearance of blue masks. For a person concerned with elegance, the surgical mask does not fit with a smart suit or evening gown. Fashion designers, « maison de mode » and artists have turned the mask from an indispensable object into a fashion accessory. Indeed, from the 16th century onwards, paintings and engravings show women using black velvet masks to protect their complexion from sunburn, or to protect their privacy. Some chroniclers even said that the black of the velvet made the neck appear whiter. This paper will not only trace the history of the mask, but will also examine the combined notions of protection and elegance.

DENIS BRUNA (Aubagne, 1967) is a doctor of history at Université de Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a research director and he joined the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris as chief curator of the pre-19th-century Fashion and Textile collections in 2011. He is also professor in the history of fashion and costume at the Ecole du Louvre. His research has focussed on the history and iconography of fashion, vestimentary customs and the body. His publications include Piercing, sur les traces d’une infamie médiévale (Textuel, 2001), Bijoux oubliés du Moyen Âge (Seuil, 2008) and Histoire des modes et du vêtement du Moyen Âge au XXIe siècle (2018). At the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, he curated “La Mécanique des dessous, une histoire indiscrète de la silhouette” in 2013, « Tenue correcte exigée, quand le vêtement fait scandale » (2016) and « Marche et démarche, une histoire de la chaussure ».

Slide

WE WEAR CLOTHES TO BECOME HUMAN. BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

Why do we wear clothes? To become human. This is usually the accepted answer. The issue is to know what to become human means. In the so-called traditional societies, the metamorphosis hasn’t severed our connection with other living beings, but it has in what we call the modern world.
What has changed with the emergence of the modern body was the internal (and universal) logic of identity construction processes in which the body is inserted. This has resulted in greater mindfulness leading us to apprehend our bodies as something exterior (my body) we can shape, a product of our own will (and power).
Are we now facing a turning point? Everything points to that. We still don’t know how to, but we´re trying to reconnect with the entities with which we share Earth’s delicate living crust. The Covid crisis has showed us that either we share our existence with the other beings or we won’t exist at all. We have yet to know how to reinvent our bodies within this new position of mere holobionts. Filomena Silvano

FILOMENA SILVANO (Marinha Grande, 1960) is an anthropologist, professor at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA FCSH) and member of the Centro em Rede em Antropologia (CRIA-NOVA FCSH). In her work, she establishes a relationship between issues of identity and the study of space, material culture and cultural expression. Filomena Silvano joined several research teams and worked with the film director João Pedro Rodrigues on four documentaries. She is the author of the books«Territórios da Identidade», «Antropologia do Espaço», «De casa em casa: sobre um encontro entre etnografia e cinema» and «Antropologia da Moda» (in Press).