Feeling Beyond the Feed: The Sensory Life of Contemporary Jewellery

We live in an era defined by the organic, yet where the natural is, in truth, an aesthetic simulation—sometimes a product designed to position itself as an illusion of autonomy or authenticity, and other times a refuge in this accelerated age.

In this context, the truly corporeal becomes a site of tension that seems to be losing power, yet where gestures seeking to recover affectivity still emerge. It is here that contemporary jewellery can offer refuge, even if momentary, as a form of resistance against digital dematerialisation. A material art that, by working with the intimate and the tactile, offers an escape route from the vertigo of the techno-rhythm that envelops us.

However, it is impossible to ignore the idea that the survival and revitalisation of contemporary jewellery today is thanks to the digital. Instagram accounts, reels, photos, and videos. From Buenos Aires, we observe the works shown during Munich Jewellery Week and pieces created in Southeast Asia. We read and marvel at what is happening in Australia and its artists. The digital also sometimes presents itself as the only way to get to know thousands of artists situated in vastly different geographies. A way of constructing a global cartography to grasp what is taking place in the universe of contemporary jewellery.
These contradictions are what move us, and they are necessary to think of jewellery as a contested territory. To exist, it must materialise, become an actual object. But to survive in a globalised world, it must dematerialise into images.


Baroque Pearl Pierced by Hansel Tai, 2024. Photo by the artist.


Can a body-bound art survive without a body?
In this split between body and object, does the jewel survive as a symbol, as a residue, or as an interface?
What changes in the aesthetic experience when performativity plays out entirely within the screen’s two-dimensional space?


Contemporary jewellery is a form of art that, like others, depends on the body to have meaning. It can exist without it, but, like crutches, it needs other things to lean on to achieve that meaning: texts, photographs, videos, and so on, to compensate for that magical and unsettling moment when a body wears a piece that breaks with expectations of what a jewel, an ornament, is supposed to be. And yet, it is the experience we least see. When do we see contemporary jewellery walking around? Perhaps only during the opening of a museum or gallery, where each artist wears their pieces, stages a living display of works and, in doing so, displaces their own identity. The jeweller is their jewellery before they are their name or face. That’s how we recognise them, that’s how we differentiate them. An object that enunciates, This is me.


So, what happens when we separate these two components? When the object becomes emancipated from the body that bears it, it circulates as an autonomous image. Where does the person go who lacks the purchasing power to become a collector, or to access a circuit of exhibitions and shows where they can witness these pieces in action? In what ways does engaging solely online with these works shape the enthusiast’s role as a consumer? Because there is something in that viewer that keeps the practice alive, and thus retains its affective power.


This viewer is part of an assemblage of material and immaterial relations. One who, on the one hand, belongs to this indistinction between the corporeal and the artificial, and who, at the same time, sustains the digital space where these works can live. A key viewer through whom the pieces reveal their multiple layers.

As Félix Guattari notes, aesthetic forms of production can function as contingent singularities—situated events that interrupt dominant logics and open up new lines of meaning. Contemporary jewellery, in its friction between the tactile and the digital, operates as one of these singular events: it escapes the classical codification of art and fashion and activates new forms of connection, identity, and desire. Its power does not lie in representing something, but in assembling bodies, territories, and affects.

But what happens to the sensory experience when the work is only accessed digitally? Understanding sensory experience as something beyond just feeling—as a being implicated in a web of affective relations that constitute us. Contemporary jewellery intervenes in a reconfiguration of the sensible. It is not a simple ornament but a zone of attention. An intimate gesture that reinscribes us into a material and affective world. Even though this viewer inhabits a digital universe, they refuse to adopt the passive attitude common among social media consumers and instead resist digital desensitisation in their way. Although we can’t deny that one question still lingers: to what extent is it reabsorbed by the logic of scrolling, of the algorithm?


To think through these tensions via contemporary jewellery is to accept that even through what appears to be an accessory, ways of inhabiting the present are configured. Because if contemporary jewellery has something singular, it is that it is an art that doesn’t need spectacle to intervene in the sensible. And precisely for that reason, it becomes a privileged terrain to detect how our relationships with the world, with objects, and with ourselves are changing.
Between the brush of the body and the glow of the screen, contemporary jewellery insists: there are still ways of feeling that don’t fit within a feed.
 

About the author

Florencia Kobelt is a graduate in art criticism and above all curious about contemporary jewelry, art, and design. Her interest views those phenomena from a place between the analytical and the sentimental, because there is no criticism without those two factors. She has published reviews of jewelry and other artistic activities (visual arts, theater) in digital magazines. She has also worked as a curator and is currently working on her own website about contemporary Argentine jewellery, Ensayo Joyero, and Jocus.art with María Eugenia Ramos about the same topic.

Links
https://current-obsession.com/argentinian-tales-1-2/
https://current-obsession.com/argentinian-tales-2-2/
https://klimt02.net/publications/books/basuradejoyeria-jewelry-waste-guigui-kohon
https://artjewelryforum.org/articles/the-fulfillment-of-desire/
https://www.instagram.com/ensayojoyero/
https://www.instagram.com/jocus.art/