Imagine you are holding a cup in your hand, a ceramic cup. It snuggles perfectly in your grip. The warmth of the tea inside, through the walls of the vessel, meets your palm, the smell wafting up and around you. The cup is created by us – yes, the collective – in what was Vera’s atelier for nearly 60 years. In that cup you hold, Vera’s legacy is imbued. The stories of the land and times where we are now are kneaded into that legacy. A universe of stories connecting all of our lives.
The cup is made of the earth we walked, explored and transformed as we used the wild clay to make part of the vessel and perhaps its glaze. We might have dug it from the bottom of a river, the side of a lake, the sediments of an ancient sea; from Maksimir or Grmoščica, from Karlovac or Blatuša. That earth itself holds stories of suffering and rejuvenation. For the glaze, we also collected empty river shells from Drava in Osijek, the Danube in Novi Sad; our glaze – the cycle of life. And the earth that rumbled, shook and roared, in 2020 in Sisak and Petrinja, that shattered many people’s lives and exposed their resilience, we have also collected, with the help of local friends, tamed and transformed it, maybe in the very cup you imagine in your hand.
The porous skin of the hands that have kneaded the clay and sculpted the cup exude stories of the lands where they were born or grew up: Afghanistan, Armenia, Bosnia, Burundi, Croatia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, France, Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Syria, Turkey, Serbia, United Kingdom, United States (by the time you read this, we could probably add a few more). Indeed, our members, including from the Women to Women collective, the ones mostly doing the ceramics, have lives connecting places far and wide.
Ah, and don’t forget that warmth and smell; now you close your eyes and feel the taste – it comes directly from China for our program Wandering Art Tea Academy.
So, now, in your imagination, you enjoyed the world in a cup, and got a taste of the world of Živi Atelje DK.
Our experiments continue, the brewing lasts, and we keep creating.
If you seek a quick run through the Atelier programs, jump to the end of this written mosaic, where we briefly list our programs and values; a result of hours of conversation in five languages in the process of writing this. However, we rather encourage you to continue slowly; to read the stories, musings and questions, as they unfold in the following segments.
Thank you for being part of this journey.