#4 Social Club Members Newsletter

Dear Social Club members!

Can you feel the summer breeze caressing your skin? The sunny days spent reading for hours on a beach or a carpet of fluffy green grass, surrounded by colourful flowers, are so palpable now! It wouldn’t be the same without some fresh monthly reads, so here we are with another newsletter bringing you the last two features on the topic of Urban Mythology from our monthly series. Dive deep into the Polish contemporary jewellery scene and explore fictional stories inspired by Estonian-Finnish archives. The latest contributions by Josh Plough and Mia Tamme are not to be missed!

Polishing the Swamp: Shadows and Decay in Polish Jewellery

Essay by Josh Plough

Not all jewellery is created equal. In Warsaw, you’ll see adverts for it when you’re on the tram or the metro, with actual names like ‘Classic Nostalgia’ or ‘Victorian Collections’ pasted on billboards. Gold shimmers next to winking gems that adorn an elegant female hand, languidly laid across a dinner table, or held against an almost bare chest, framed by an elegant black silk dress. We’re supposed to want to be in that world of crystal, with its smooth inviting surfaces and precise moral angles. But if you linger on the image for a while, which I tend to do when riding the tram, you realise there is nowhere to hide in that world. No deep shadows, no pits, no gullies. It’s flawless, perfect, and caught under a constant spotlight. Nothing lives in these scenes except envy.

Josh Plough writes in his introduction to the immersive Polish jewellery scene. Continue reading about the young Polish designers via this link (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

An Armour of Bright Tears

Three jewellery inspired fictional stories by Mia Tamme

Mia Tamme is an artist, filmmaker, and storyteller from Tallinn, Estonia. The following three jewellery inspired tales are part of Mia’s ongoing text-performance-visual research project, ‘An Armour of Bright Tears.’ Through images from the National Archive of Estonia, Mia creates threads for telling fabulated stories. Patching together her research visits to craftswomen, local oral histories, and ethnographic research, she imagines the realities that might have been overlooked by patriarchal nationalist archive practices.

‘I am after the undocumented jewels. The ones that must have become tangled—I am sure of it—on somebody’s neck. I long to see the pearls that fell beyond the reach of foreign folklorists and nationalist archivists. Thus, I search in images that linger between private memories and masculine archives for beads that were too dull for shiny photographs.’

Read the full feature here (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).

SO MINT! by Lorena Rode

Our yearly graduate series is back!

Lorena Rode is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges from sculptures, wearables, performances to poetry. She grew up moving between Europe, South America, and Africa. Having witnessed many different ecosystems, cultures, values, and relationships, she became deeply drawn to what these diverse forms of coexistence entail. Within her practice, she seeks to redefine our ways of living together, particularly aiming to foster more symbiotic relationships between people, nature, and our environment.

Read more about Lorena’s graduation project via this link (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)!

Are you a recent graduate with remarkable work to share? Submit your graduation portfolio to veronika@current-obsession.com (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) with the subject line ‘SO MINT!’

As always, we would love to hear from you in case you have any membership related questions at veronika@current-obsession.com (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)!