In the landscape of contemporary art, ceramics has experienced a profound revitalization over the last two decades, transforming from an artisanal practice sometimes relegated to an expression of traditional knowledge into a privileged medium for numerous international visual artists. The dialectical tension between ancestral technique and contemporary language has allowed for the emergence of an expressive territory where the tactile dimension and the experience of matter serve as a counterpoint to the digital dematerialization that permeates our daily lives. It is no coincidence that some art historians like Hans Belting have identified in the physicality of clay an ontological resistance to the evanescence of contemporary images, while critic Nicolas Bourriaud recognizes in ceramic practice a paradigm of relational aesthetics, by virtue of its ability to reconnect the human to the materiality of the world through transformative gesture.
Bottega ceramica ad Assemini (Sardegna), ph. courtesy AiCC – Associazione italiana Città della Ceramica
The landscape of contemporary ceramics is now characterized by prominent figures who have contributed significantly to the revaluation of this medium in the visual arts. Artists such as Andrea Salvatori deconstruct traditional Faenza iconography through operations of assemblage and decontextualization, while Nero/Alessandro Neretti uses ceramics as a vehicle to investigate political and social themes. On another front, Sissi explores the plastic potential of clay to create immersive installations that question the body-matter relationship, while the duo Bertozzi & Casoni, through surprising technical virtuosity, transfigure everyday objects into hyperrealistic sculptures charged with symbolic value. No less significant are the research of Chiara Camoni, who in her ceramic creations recovers a ritual and participatory dimension of artistic making, of Salvatore Arancio, who creates hallucinatory and visionary landscapes, or of Vincenzo Cabiati, who uses ceramics as a narrative surface for visual stories poised between irony and melancholy.
Bottega ceramica ad Impruneta (Toscana), ph. courtesy AiCC – Associazione italiana Città della Ceramica
In this context of renewed interest, the event “Buongiorno Ceramica!” takes place, which this year reaches its eleventh edition, configuring itself as a cultural device capable of simultaneously activating 58 Italian municipalities in an articulated celebration of artistic and artisanal ceramics. The temporal density of the event – concentrated on May 17 and 18, 2025 – creates an effect of synchronicity that allows one to perceive the extension and depth of the national ceramic heritage as a cultural “nervous system” that crosses the peninsula connecting centers of great historical tradition to emerging realities. The cartography drawn by this widespread manifestation reveals how ceramics in Italy represents not only an archive of sedimented techniques and knowledge, but a generative humus in continuous evolution, where the procedural memory of ancient “territories of affirmed ceramic tradition” dialogues with contemporary instances. This creates an osmosis between past and present where temporal layers are not arranged in linear succession, but coexist in a dynamic co-presence that nourishes the present with stratified meanings.
Creazioni al tornio a Cutrofiano (Puglia), ph. courtesy AiCC – Associazione italiana Città della Ceramica
The articulation of the event – which includes over 500 appointments between workshops, exhibitions, installations, guided tours, performances – allows us to grasp ceramics in its intermedial dimension, capable of serving as a point of intersection between different artistic practices. In this way, the ceramic medium configures itself as a liminal territory, an interstitial space in which different disciplines can meet and contaminate each other, generating new semantic and experiential fields. It is precisely in this fluidity between languages that we can recognize the contemporary vitality of ceramic making, which abandons categorical rigidity to embrace a nomadic and rhizomatic condition, to use Deleuzian terminology.
Good Morning Ceramics 2024 a Kütahya (Turchia), ph. courtesy AiCC – Associazione italiana Città della Ceramica
The exhibition path disseminated in the 58 participating Italian cities allows appreciation of both traditional and experimental expressions, tracing an itinerary that goes from the historic workshops of Montelupo Fiorentino, Deruta, or Vietri sul Mare to the innovative ateliers of young designers and contemporary artists. The tension between conservation and innovation emerges with particular evidence in the various regional declinations: from Apulian polychrome majolica to Tuscan terracotta, from Umbrian Renaissance graffiti to Sicilian figurative ceramics, each territory articulates its own expressive vocabulary that preserves technical and formal specificities. This is not, however, a simple review of local traditions, but an opportunity to explore how these territorial identities reconfigure themselves in the encounter with contemporary aesthetic instances. The event invites discovery of the workshops and laboratories scattered throughout the Italian territory: from the ceramics of Montelupo Fiorentino and Impruneta in Tuscany to those of Assemini in Sardinia, from the wheel creations of Urbania in the Marche to those of Cutrofiano in Puglia, to the exhibitions of Pesaro and Nove in Veneto. Each center proposes its own dialogue between artisanal knowledge and contemporary experimentation, testifying to the vitality of an expressive language that continues to renew itself while maintaining deep roots in tradition.
Progetto Made in loco a Grottaglie (Puglia), ph. courtesy AiCC – Associazione italiana Città della Ceramica
The event thus configures itself as a living atlas of Italian ceramic practices, capable of mapping not only techniques and languages, but also the relationships that exist between the actors of this ecosystem: master craftsmen, emerging artists, designers, cultural and educational institutions. The relational dimension of the event allows us to grasp how contemporary ceramics feeds on a constant exchange between traditional knowledge and innovative experimentation, between manual gesture and conceptual design. The international openness, with the participation of European ceramic cities such as Kunštát in the Czech Republic and Caldas da Rainha in Portugal, further enriches this cartography, suggesting possible connections and reciprocal influences between different traditions. In this transnational context, ceramics reveals itself as a universal language capable of crossing geographical and cultural boundaries, while maintaining strong identity roots. “Buongiorno Ceramica!” thus invites the public to an immersion in the tactile physicality of a medium that in its apparent material simplicity – water and earth – contains an extraordinary linguistic complexity. The experience proposed is that of a sensory as well as cultural journey, in which knowledge passes through direct encounter with transformed matter and with those who shape this matter daily.
Info:
“Buongiorno Ceramica!” – 11th edition
17th and 18th May 2025
58 Italian ceramic municipalities
https://www.buongiornoceramica.it/
Actor and performer, he loves visual arts in all their manifestations.
NO COMMENT