Now we are faced with a documentary video. San Giorgio di Perlena, 2014, inside a workshop, Massimo Lunardon, renowned glass artist. Lunardon is arranging his tools for blowing and shaping a traditional Venetian water vase, but behind him, the designer Martí Guixé is primed to begin a series of blows, shoves and jerks that will obstruct the entire laborious process of creation. A manifest boycott, or better yet, a manifesto of boycotting the artisan’s ability, of boycotting the wisdom handed down by tradition and the consciousness each of their movements produce. This is not a fight scene; both parties’ attitudes express complicity, free play and peer conflict. Neither the aggression of the party-pooping designer nor the resistance of the suffering artisan reach an intensity that overshadows the work process, which follows, albeit not invariably, its course. The result, Craft Terror, without impositions of preconceived happiness and born of a moment of fortune7 liberates its actors from the normative constraints within their respective disciplines, from their bonds to their professional profile and from the virtues of their previous work. A strange meeting of strangers from which a strange vase has sprung forth without having an already assigned place and without it being assigned to anybody.
7The distinction between imposed happiness and moment of fortune can be found in the context of a feminist lecture on “affective turn” in S. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).
Extract from:
Craft Crash – Four Stories of Flowers and Vase
by Octavi Rofes
Published in the exhibition catalogue:
On Flower Power: The Role of the Vase in Arts, Crafts and Design
(Galleria Nazionale di Roma, Corraini Edizioni, 2019).
The Venice Glass Week
September 19–21, 2025
Roundtable
Friday, September 19 at 5:00 PM
Craft Terror. Technique Out of Control
With Martí Guixé, Massimo Lunardon, Jean Blanchaert, and Cristina Beltrami
Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice
Still image from the video Craft Terror. Inga Knölke, 2014
