It sounds like the start of a lame joke: Did you hear the one about the Moor and the Sicilian? But for Moulding Tradition, Formafantasma’s Design Academy Eindhoven thesis project, the Italian-born, Eindhoven-based duo did in fact look to a centuries-old conflict between Sicily and the North Africans who once conquered the tiny island and who now arrive there in droves, seeking refuge.
It all started on a trip to Sicily, the island 26-year-old Andrea Trimarchi calls home (Simone Farresin, 29, grew up in a town close to Venice, and the two met during an earlier design education in Florence.) They were visiting Caltagirone, a small city known for its majolica ceramics. The two became fascinated by the local culture’s blithe attitude toward teste di moro, a ceramic vase depicting the face of an Arab wearing turbans and crowns, its lips exaggerated and its face mustachioed. Despite its implications, the vase is cherished as a souvenir and artifact in many Sicilian households.
For their thesis, Trimarchi and Farresin set out to rethink the teste di moro and other traditional ceramic vessels. To give the pieces a more modern context, they centered the narrative around illegal immigration; after all, they point out, “the same people who once occupied Sicily, bringing their culture and the material majolica, are returning not as conquerors, but as immigrants.” Each item in the collection speaks to some aspect of the immigrant experience — wine bottles, for example, to recall the fruit in Sicily harvested by migrants, and bowls to represent the boats conveying refugees across the Mediterranean.
The result is a collection of five smooth ceramic pieces decorated with photographs, tools, tags, and ribbons and tile printed with immigration data. Formafantasma initially meant for the collection to address the role craft plays in perpetuating tradition, and the way it makes us forget to question the origin of things. But by the end of the project, they’d begun to wonder if their collection could help create new traditions. They returned to Sicily, where they asked a folk group — of which Trimarchi was once a part — to use their flask as a wind instrument and prop in a performance of “Arabs in Palermo,” a traditional folk song referring to the 10th-century African invasion. Click here to view the eerie video they produced, and keep reading to learn more about the making of Moulding Tradition.
Moulding Tradition, Trimarchi and Farresin’s Design Academy Eindhoven thesis, consists of five ceramic vessels based on historical archetypes: two bowls, a vase, a wine cask, and a flask.
Teste di moro, a traditional Sicilian vase depicting the face of an Arab, served as the basis for the project. These vases began to appear in the 17th or 18th century — referring to a period of Arabian conquest in the 10th century — and to this day, they can be found hanging from Sicilian balconies, bursting with plant life. “There are all sorts of folk stories surrounding this vase,” says Farresin. “Like when a Sicilian prince would cut the head of a Moor, they’d hang the head out on the balcony. But I don’t think it’s true.”
One of the biggest challenges, says Farresin, was finding an appropriate form to convey their concept. “We had all this data about the number of refugees, when they were coming, and how many per day. We thought we could use it to create a form on the computer. But that was such an abstract solution. Looking at the object, you’d never connect it back with the original piece.” The duo kept an inspiration wall to remind them how far they could go depicting the story in ceramic while staying true to the original piece.
“We usually make a first sketch and model with elements we have at home,” says Farresin. For one of their first experiments, Formafantasma connected a series of 14 Ikea bowls with sailing rope to create a 3-D map of the countries from which refugees were arriving on Italy’s shores.
Formafantasma traveled to Caltagirone three times during the course of the project, visiting with some of the city’s 300 craftsmen. Shown here are teste di moro molds. “It’s funny,” says Farresin. “Andrea was part of a folk group and into these folkloristic things, but I think when I went with him, he got to know Sicily through my eyes. When something is so common for you, you start to not even see it.”
Unfired Sicilian majolica flasks inside the workshop of Giacomo Alessi, one of Caltagirone’s most famous artists.
Formafantasma worked with a single craftsman in Caltagirone (pictured here is his son) to make the initial models and molds, then did all of the casting and design work back in Holland.
The teste di moro depict a generic figure. For Moulding Tradition, Formafantasma sought to inject an element of reality by photographing Sofien Adeyemi, a former refugee who’d made the trek from Nigeria to Lampedusa, a small Mediterranean island where immigrants debark by the hundreds during summer months.
One idea was to create an actual mold of Adeyemi’s face, which would then be attached to the outer edge of their Moor vase. “It was too much with the mask and the frame,” says Farresin of the above experiment, which was eventually discarded. “We wanted to keep things simple.”
Another abandoned element: A drawing of a Moor by a Dutch painter, transferred onto a coin. “We thought it could refer back to the invasion, but in the end, it was too figurative. You’re creating a language and an alphabet of elements with each project, and this didn’t fit.”
On the large bowls, each circular element refers to an arrival by sea. The bowls are hung with buoy-like discs engraved with the names of countries as well as the percentage of refugees per year who immigrate from each one.
A textile ribbon, bearing the dates of Sicilian conquests, binds the construction together. “In Caltagirone, the need to increase production speed has impoverished details and finishing, and most of the decorations and handles are roughly applied on top of the vases,” Formafantasma says. “We decided to emphasize this way of working by applying all of the elements with an external material such as rubber bands, ribbons, etc.”
Elements of the flask in the workshop
Formafantasma’s flask represents Adeyemi’s journey; a ceramic tile attached to the back is engraved with the names of the countries he passed through on his way from Nigeria to Italy.
Each piece is marked with a tag depicting the dates during which Sicily was considered an emirate, ruled by the Arabs.
“In a way, the collection looks unfinished,” says Farresin. “But we liked that. History and tradition can always change. You can always arrange the elements in another way. Nothing is fixed.”
As I walked the Tendence gift fair in Frankfurt this summer, Iris Maschek appeared to me like an oasis of glam in a desert of practicality. There she was, surrounded by clocks and soaps and clever ceramic jugs with customizable chalkboard labels, dressed all in black and perched in a cool mid-century rattan chair against this gorgeously baroque Rorschach-like backdrop: A specimen from her very first wallpaper collection.
It’s half past eight on a Wednesday evening, and in the kitchen of the Pastoor Van Ars church, a few miles from Eindhoven’s prestigious Design Academy, a long table has been set with two propane gas burners. Normally, the burners here are used to boil massive amounts of newspaper into pulp bound for the cocoon-like structures of Nacho Carbonell’s Evolution collection. But tonight the Spanish-born designer has hijacked the flames to fry up two huge paellas: chicken and pancetta for the meat-eaters, eggplant and artichokes for the vegetarians.
