Fondazione Culturale Officine Saffi ETS
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20154 Milano
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In Milan, 28 artists from 41 countries explore ceramics as a material capable of carrying gestures, memories and identities, challenging the boundaries between art, craft and design.
Ceramics has shifted significantly within contemporary design culture, moving beyond the traditional sphere of craft and functional objects to become a medium for sculpture, installation and collectible design. The sixth edition of the Officine Saffi Award, presented through the exhibition Forms of Belonging in Milan until 13 November, traces this transformation through the work of 28 artists selected from more than 1,000 applications from 41 countries across five continents. The theme chosen for this edition is belonging, a word that takes on a particularly tangible meaning when applied to ceramics because the material maintains a direct relationship with place, technique, people and the time required to transform it.
The works on view move across different geographies and practices, bringing together functional objects, sculptures, installations and pieces in which narrative takes precedence over function. Rather than proposing a single definition of contemporary ceramics, the exhibition presents a constellation of approaches that reveals how clay has become a shared territory between disciplines once considered separate. The main award was given to South African artist Andile Dyalvane for iThwasa (The One Who is Blossoming), a work created together with his wife Nkuthazo Alexis Dyalvane. His practice brings a strong connection between material, identity and spirituality into the exhibition, transforming the object into something capable of carrying traces of a collective experience. It is an approach that allows belonging to be understood not simply as a geographical condition, but as a relationship built through gestures and forms of knowledge passed from one generation to another. The same tension can be found across many of the selected works, where traditional techniques coexist with experimental processes and the surface becomes a record of the hand, the deformation of the material or the unpredictable effects of firing.
This relationship between control and unpredictability is one of the reasons ceramics continues to attract artists and designers. It is a material that can be carefully designed, yet during the making process retains a degree of autonomy. Form can be precisely conceived, but fire, weight, water and the behaviour of glazes introduce variables that become part of the work itself. The material is therefore not simply a support for an idea, but one of the elements through which that idea takes shape. Forms of Belonging also places contemporary art, high craft and collectible design alongside one another, three fields that increasingly share the same makers, tools and spaces of research.
The distinction between a unique artwork, a functional object and a collectible piece becomes less defined when attention shifts towards the process through which an object is made and the story it is able to carry. The collaboration with Tacchini adds another layer to this reflection. The new Tacchini Prize was awarded to artist, researcher and writer Bisila Noha, whose work is presented until 13 November at Casa Tacchini in Brera.
A Tactile Story brings ceramics beyond the context of the foundation and into a domestic environment, placing the works alongside furniture and objects and changing the way they are experienced. The choice is significant because the house becomes part of the reading of the work: material enters an inhabited space and comes into contact with other forms, functions and memories. Noha’s research is rooted in the relationship between material, human experience and design, making the domestic setting a natural context in which to consider what objects can preserve and transmit. The presence of this second project is also significant because belonging is not explored only through the origins of the artists or the cultures they represent, but through the places in which their work enters into relation with other forms of material life. Home, studio, workshop and city become parts of the same system.
This perspective reflects the way contemporary ceramics has developed in recent years, opening itself to collaborations with designers, architects, galleries and companies and finding new contexts beyond institutions traditionally associated with craft.
Officine Saffi has built an international network around the award, offering finalists opportunities for residencies and research in different countries, from Switzerland and Denmark to Portugal, China and Italy. The award therefore extends beyond the Milan exhibition, allowing artists and their practices to move between different contexts. This also makes the idea of belonging less static: to belong does not necessarily mean remaining attached to one place, but can mean carrying a technique, a memory or a way of working into another context and allowing it to enter into new relationships. Ceramics is particularly suited to expressing this condition because it maintains a physical connection with earth and gesture while remaining capable of taking radically contemporary forms.
Across Forms of Belonging, this dual nature emerges without needing to be declared. Some surfaces reveal the work of the hand, others appear to have been shaped through almost industrial processes, while others use ceramics as part of a larger environment. What connects them is the ability of the material to record something, whether a gesture, a technique, a personal memory or a relationship with a place. This may be one of the reasons ceramics continues to find new space within contemporary design: not because it represents a return to tradition, but because it allows the past to enter into dialogue with a design culture increasingly interested in processes, material origins and the stories objects can contain. Forms of Belonging presents a discipline that is no longer concerned with defining its boundaries, but with using them as a starting point for creating new relationships between material, people and place.
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