Damian Fopp

The residency at CERCCO from Octobre 2014 to Decembre 2014 was thoroughly an enriching experience.
During these three months, which turned out to be really short, I worked four days a week at the atelier space at Bd. James-Fazy, which I was provided with.

[...] You would think during three months in a ceramic workshop you learn about porcelain and glazes, and yes of course this was a big part of it. But I would heavily stress the fact that this residency goes far beyond ceramics and plays a bigger role in bringing people with different backgrounds together and in my case even to teach me what Switzerland is actually about.

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Hella Berent

The innate memory of the material tested me. Endurance and duration, these indeterminate words, became the supporting columns in realizing the elusiveness of the image that eventually hung on the wall. After three months, the realm of subversion had opened up threateningly and the delusion of uniqueness fired the energy to see an image ‘without image.’ 

The decisive question for me now is whether after the intensely physical work processes ‘the mirror’ will be able to enter a socio-contemporary discourse.

The tension of the work process lies in the ‘beyond the lines of control,’ in the playing field of thinking and experience.

During the days of patience that lay between casting the form and deciding that the form was stable enough to be turned out on a ‘drying rack’ in preparation for the first firing, I worked in contrast to the geometrical abstraction in the damp earth- room in the play-mountains of the porcelain cuboids. The play of unknowingness became the carrier of inspiration, of colors and forms that danced in my mind creating waves that disproved the rules of chemistry and fire.