The International Fair Beautiful. Ceramic. Useful (11th edition)
The event is meant to be a „different” potters’ fair, developing an innovative concept of organizing a fair and experimental pottery workshops, traditional gastronomy, everything on a predetermined theme each year.
The fair challenges the potters to leave their comfort zone that of just selling their products and to do research in the museum’s collections, with the specialists’ help, in order to (re)produce ceramic pieces following the model of some inactive centers (experimenting even older working, decoration and burning techniques, most of the times unknown).The specialists are challenged to approach old collections and to bring them up to date, and the visitors to meet and know the pottery craft and the benefits of cooking in clay pots, following traditional recipes.
During the fair each attending potter from Romania and the neighboring countries like Hungary and Republic of Moldova compete working at the potter’s wheel and reproducing a vessel from ASTRA Museum’s collection (each year a different ceramics center is revived), also presenting two pieces made in one’s workshop and then cooking at the open fireplace traditional food recipes using one’s own clay pots, in the end the judging committees deciding the winners.
The interdisciplinary dialogue between the potters and the ceramics researchers conducts to solutions and information exchange about used materials and techniques and also about marketing strategies to sell the products and also about ways to avoid the kitsch in this field.
The material and immaterial heritage promoted by the potters that attend the ceramics fair from Dumbrava Sibiului is constituted from a spectacular, practical and applied part, that is completed by an open dialogue between specialists in this field and the practitioners, and aso by experimental workshops proposed for the public.
Text as provided by the organiser(s).
