When Catalan collective Joyas Sensacionales explores the concept of resilience, applied to contemporary jewellery design.

In psychology, resilience refers to the ability of an individual to "bounce back", to overcome trauma. Widely popularized by the work of the French ethologist and neuro-psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, this term originally defines the shock-resistance capacity of a material.

The project DEBRIS FERTILES is precisely born from the desire to explore this analogy between the world of inert material and human psyche. How to represent this slow process of transformation, how to materialize the irreversible imprint inscribed as well in the soul as in the flesh, through a jewel?

This exhibition features the result of the research conducted by fifteen members of the contemporary jewellery collective Joyas Sensacionales since our meeting in March 2017, during the Jewellery Week in Munich, where this project was born.

The group Joyas Sensacionales (sensational jewels) was formed in 2008 at the initiative of Silvia Walz, an internationally renowned art jeweller and professor of jewellery design at the Massana school in Barcelona.

The project stems from the desire to bring together former students to create some kind of creative platform, a field of exchange and experimentation, allowing emerging artists to break with solitude and pool their questions in the form of collaborative workshops. The Taller Perill, which Alicia Giraldez founded the same year, soon became the venue for the group's exhibitions.

The topic proposed by the gallery is therefore a continuation of the group's reflections, which already devoted five years of common work to the exploration of sensations.

But at a time when Catalonia is experiencing one of the most serious crises of its recent history, the exhibition DEBRIS FERTILES is colored with an unprecedented dimension in the history of a collective, deeply animated by empathy and generosity. Beyond resilience, as recalled by Ramon Puig Cuyas, a member of the group, former professor at the Massana school, and emblematic figure of the Spanish contemporary jewellery scene, this exhibition aims to reaffirm the universal values of evolution, equity, collaboration and freedom attached to Art.

 

 Artists :

Xus Anglès - Núria Anguren - Montse Basora - Gemma Canal - Lourdes Carmelo - Ramon Puig Cuyás - Nicole Deuster - Carla Garcia Durlan - Alicia Giráldez - Lola Gratacos - Sebastià Macia- Clara Niubò - Carme Roher - Fátima Tocornal - Silvia Walz


Exhibition of contemporary jewellery November 25 - December 23, 2017.

Opening reception Novembrer 25, 3-7 pm.

We really live a difficult time, but in front of totalitarianism and the reappearance of an inheritance of the Franco regime, we must defend democracy, for all, for the citizens of Catalonia, but also for Spain, and for a European Community controlled by the great economic powers. Therefore, the theme of the exhibition "Resilience" is very present, citizens of Catalonia have experienced it for three hundred years.
By my age, I still remember the injustices of the era of Franco's dictatorship, now they are repeated the same, we are afraid, yes, but we also have the strength of our profoundly democratic conviction. We must remember and defend that power is in citizens who freely express themselves and vote, although this may seem a little utopian and romantic. The struggle of the citizens of Catalonia is to achieve a better quality of democracy, it is not an identity struggle.
I do not believe in a political art, as a form of propaganda and proselytism, but I believe that doing Art is a way of doing politics. Every act of creation must be an act of transgression, transformation and questioning of pre-established ideas. Art does not have the Truth, but it seeks it persistently. The artistic creation is a way to build an intimate freedom and to control our own destiny.
When in the seventies, I started to make jewellery, I was convinced that being part of the ideas and concepts of the "New Jewellery" was a way of contributing to a change in the values of society. A jewellery based on other values that were not the price of money, of materials. A jewellery that expresses the values of a society less hierarchical, more democratic and egalitarian. A jewellery that claimed the equality of genres, the collaboration between people around the world through the language and the universal values of art. Today, I believe that these ideas remain valid
.

Ramon Puig Cuyas, November 2017.