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Curated by: Think Tank: a European Initiative for the Applied Arts
www.thinktank04.eu

Necklace selected by Love Jönsson.

The crafts are often claimed to embody tradition and continuity. According to some, it is indeed this very quality that makes craft worthwhile: craft is about handing down age-old knowledge and skills, making it a practice that connects modern society with its past.

Pia Aleborg’s eye-catching necklace, made mostly from recycled computer and telephone wire, confronts us with a different notion of craft. This object does not speak about the past, but about contemporary daily life. The wire stands out as an explicit reference to the flow of information, and to the desire to be constantly connected or online, whether during our working hours or our leisure time. The
wire necklace can, furthermore, be seen as a symbol of the crafts themselves, a field characterized by a steady circulation of information and ideas.

What the maker offers her audience and potential clients is not a possibility for identification with a historical past, but rather something more elusive and fleeting. Even the object’s currency as a token of the present remains unstable, as the wire materials it makes use of are so much of their period that it is soon bound to look old. In fact, in many homes and offices the wire, as a connecting device, has already been rendered obsolete by the ubiquitous wireless solution.

The necklace hints that craft’s purchase in society is always changing. It also serves as an example of how today’s makers in craft often choose to highlight what is temporal and passing, instead of striving to make their work address eternal values.

text by Love Jönsson.

Currency exhibition and events in 2010 and 2011:

Currency Symposium, Gmunden-Austria, 16.09 till 19.09.2010

Currency exhibition, Kammerhof Museen Gmunden, Gmunden/Austria, 16.09. – 03.10.2010

Currency exhibition, Galleri Officinet, Kopenhagen/Denmark, 14.01 – 12.02.2011

Currency exhibition, Internationale Handwerksmesse München/Germany, 16 – 22.03.2011

Currency exhibition, Galleri Format, Oslo/Norway, 07.04 – 08.05.2011

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