initiation
In 2025 I undertook a deliberately labour-intensive making project for AfrikaBurn, shaped by the event’s ethos of gifting and decommodification—a temporary culture “unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising,” where participatory experience is valued over consumption.
planning
Working under severe time constraints alongside exhibition deadlines, I nevertheless chose to prepare and use reclaimed clay that was ideal for the project. I threw small, thick-walled cylinders at cup scale, then hand-carved each form so that every piece became a unique gift. After bisque firing, I glazed the cups using a focused selection of my specially created glazes—greens, browns, and red—allowing variation to emerge through layering. In total, seventy chawans (tea bowls) were completed.
outcome
At the event, the objects became part of a small ritual. We set up a nomad-style bedouin camp near a major artwork, served tea in the bowls, and gifted the cups to anyone who came by. After initial hesitation, people settled into the invitation: they sipped their tea, viewed the artwork with cup in hand, sat on cushions, ate rusks, and began talking—sometimes with us (my husband as collaborator and co-host), sometimes with other strangers. The camp became a small social infrastructure for slowing down: a lived counterpoint to acceleration and a practical enactment of attention, exchange, and presence. In that slowing-down I recognised what Hartmut Rosa describes as relationship with the world through contact, response, and transformation—where attention replaces rushing, and an object functions less as “product” than as a carrier of encounter.
