Columns - Pebbles
by Francesca Balena Arista
by Francesca Balena Arista
Earth and fire. Can you think of anything more original, more primitive than that?
Terracotta is made of earth and fire, and it is for this reason that Ettore Sottsass loved it so much. It is the oldest expression of ceramics. It is a material used since very ancient times. “This is why I use it,” he writes, “perhaps it seems to me like a symbol, as if I were using, almost, my own flesh.” What Sottsass loves in terracotta is its intrinsic poverty.
So fragile, it is a perfect material for expressing his poetics, which finds in fragility and doubt its foundational principles. “It seems to me that terracotta is suitable for making things that indicate the misery and fragility of a destiny, rather than its strength and victory,” he states.
And again: “I have made mountains of terracotta, impossible to make, impossible to transport, to assemble, to use, and to pay for. … Even the Tower of Babel was made of terracotta. Even the colossus in King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream had feet of terracotta … the first failures of humanity have to do with terracotta.”
But let us take a step back: where does all this begin? In 1961, at the age of forty-four, Sottsass undertook his first trip to the East: three months between India, Burma, and Nepal. India in particular—a subcontinent still very mysterious and completely outside tourist routes—seemed to him to preserve an uninterrupted link with the millennia-old culture of its origins, in which life and death coexist in “a circular spectacle of splendor and horror without interruption.” Upon returning to Italy, his attention focused on ceramics, which he had already practiced since 1955, but which now became his main field of experimentation for the following decade. He worked with the Bitossi Manufactory in Montelupo Fiorentino.
Thus were born ceramics like votive offerings, with names sometimes contemplative, sometimes unsettling, such as the yantra ceramics, the tantra ceramics, the smoke ceramics, or the ceramics of darkness. Working with ceramics was, for Sottsass, “a very strong physical emotion … an immersion into the material.”
The journey to the East marked a real watershed. It was thanks to this experience that his anti-rationalist convictions took shape. Sottsass became convinced that objects must have a primarily “sensory” function, as in ancient times, among primitive populations, who recognized in them a shamanic, transitional role. It was a true refounding of the language of design starting from codes that Western design culture had lost. “Every day,” he states, “rationalism tries to replace rituals with automatisms. … If there is a reason why design exists … it is that design can restore or give to tools and things that charge of sacredness that allows human beings to escape mortal automatism and return to ritual.”
There are two fundamental texts for understanding his poetics: The Ceramics of Darkness (1963) and Experience with Ceramics (1970). In the latter, he outlines the difference between what he calls Mediterranean terracotta—always rooted in a popular, non-mythical dimension—and Oriental ceramics or porcelain. Sottsass observes that “people in the East have always endeavored to entrust the poorest materials with magical tensions, meditative silences, patient preciousness.”
Guided by his pacifist thought, at the end of the 1960s Sottsass entrusted his most political projects to ceramics, because “ceramics can bear everything,” he writes, “old, dry, gentle terracotta bears everything …” These were the years of street protests against the Vietnam War, and in 1967 Sottsass designed and created monumental totems in brilliant polychrome ceramics titled Menhir, Ziggurat, Stupas, Hydrants and Gas Pumps, a sort of irreverent manifesto against established power. In these same years arose the idea for the exhibition Miljö För En Ny Planet, literally “Landscape for a New Planet,” held at the National Museum in Stockholm in 1969, for which he designed pillars and monumental pacifist altars made from hundreds of stacked ceramic discs, inviting silence and meditation.
Already in 1963, speaking of his ceramics of darkness, he had written: “… And then you find Saladin, Sultan of Egypt, sending forty pieces of ceramics of a special greenish-grey color to Nur ad-Din, Sultan of Damascus … Because they exchanged ceramics as gifts. Can you imagine the Sultan of the United States of America giving ceramics to the Sultan of all Bolshevik Russia? These modern sultans do not believe in ceramics. … They believe in atomics. And the darkness spreads again … but I cannot do anything. Very little. Only ceramics.”