Senza Confini

This catalogue reflects the nature of the project ‘Senza Confini’ - a private initiative by two makers (Zanini and Sicuro) inviting another five to exhibit together, unconstrained by either the visual identity of the host (in this case, the Museo Etnografico of Udine) or of the organizers. We all felt it would be a nice change to come up with a format reflecting the theme of the exhibition, and thankfully, the group was small enough to discuss.
‘Without boundaries’, the show’s title, suggests that cultural identity is more than just a matter of provenance, and reflects the experimental nature of contemporary jewellery. So we were playing with these notions (identity and provenance), poking fun at Italian campanilism (a severe type of regionalism) and I thought it could be interesting to use a passport in a transgressive way, by replacing references to countries, cities, or place of birth by their respective distance to the exhibition space: Zanini and Sicuro are within 20 km of Udine, Romans show up at 642 km, and Alessia Semeraro, who lives in Barcelona, is 1345km away.
Assuming that the sort of work showcased in the exhibition would be new territory for most of the visitors, the small passport invites them to travel to that destination, while suggesting that the exhibitors all come from different places, with different cultural backgrounds, not necessarily tied to their place of birth.
We used stamps, finally, to underline (again!) the idea of mobility, of people and objects...I personally like the fact, known by few people outside the profession, that most of us send jewellery pieces, in silver, paper, wood or gold, by post. At any given time, there are kilos of jewellery floating around the plurinational world of postal bags, vans, and airplanes...

Benjamin Lignel, jewellery designer, lives and works in Paris.