Hochschule Trier. BFA and MFA Degree Show 2021

Artist list

Silvia Bellia, Jose Martin Carreño Mendoza, Nga Ching Ko, Susie Heuberger, Zekun Jin, Nikita Kavryzhkin, Jasmin Schlesiger, Birgit Thalau, Oles Tsura, Luisa Werner, Oscar Wippermann

The interdisciplinary debate that has been going on in many places for decades, about what jewellery is, crafts, design or art? has significantly contributed to sharpening the profile of our department within the framework of the Bologna process. The re-thinking of the task of jewellery, as we interpret and understand it today, leads to a focussing position, which is defined i.a. by an investigation of the relationships to neighboring areas:

Jewellery is not Craft. Although there is an intersection with the central position of masterly skill there, the contemporary jewellery focus is different.

Jewellery is not Design. There is an intersection with the central position of a fashionable aestheticization and its successful marketing - the contemporary jewellery focus is different.

Jewellery is not Free Art. Although there is an intersection with the central position of "existence out of oneself" - the contemporary jewellery focus is different.

However, our aim is not to draw lines of demarcation or to sharpen them, and thus to rethink the question of the identity of jewellery makers only in the context of already existing but not sufficient catalogues of criteria in other fields. Because, as in jewellery, handicraft and art, extensive specialization harbors the danger of inner failure:
In an interview in the "Zeit"  from March 2008, Philippe Starck states:

"Everything I've designed is absolutely unnecessary. Structurally, design is completely useless. Design is nothing. I tried to give my products some sense and energy. Even though I did my best, it was useless."

With the above quote, Starck not only questions his entire work; Design as a source of objects and products that are free of any possible meaning and therefore no real contribution to this world, he rejects the raison d'être. This point of view is easily applicable to contemporary perceptions in the various areas of jewellery in which, in the last 40 years, there has been a total removal of societal, identity-creating meaning in both jewellery, fashion, and artist or so-called author jewellery.

The aim is therefore to formulate an approach that leads, even in the context of the recently increased demand for interdisciplinarity, to an independent approach to an extended spectrum of possibilities.


Guiding teachers:
Theo Smeets, Eva-Maria Kollischan, Ute Eitzenhöfer, Julia Wild, Levan Jishkariani, Felicia Mülbaier