Chryssa Kotoula: We Are Walking, Talking Minerals
The Fondazione Officine Saffi presents the first solo show of work by Greek-born artist Chryssa Kotoula. We Are Walking, Talking Minerals opened on July 8th and is on view through August 1, 2025.
The Fondazione Officine Saffi presents We Are Walking, Talking Minerals, the first solo Italian exhibition by Greek artist Chryssa Kotoula. This material-focused show is the culmination of Kotoula’s recent artist residency at the Milan-based foundation, where she explored the expressive and ecological potentials of ceramic remnants.
Kotoula is known for a hybrid practice that merges fine art, design, and craft. With a background in painting, ceramics, and sustainable building, she brings an interdisciplinary awareness to her work—one that bridges ancient techniques and contemporary issues of the day. At Officine Saffi, she focuses on ceramic waste—dried clays, broken glazes, unused pigments—gathered from the foundation’s own workshops and previous residency workshops. These cast-off materials are recontextualized into sculptural forms that evoke ruins, prototypes, and speculative organisms. Her work interrogates not only material life cycles but also the porous borders between the organic and the artificial.
Central to Kotoula’s methodology is her reinterpretation of terrazzo, the ancient Roman technique of embedding fragments into surfaces, and which has seen a reemergence of popularity in recent years. Instead of traditional flooring, Kotoula reworks this logic into ceramic forms that mix elements of sculpture and furniture, and play around with any traditional connotations. Clay and glaze chips are not applied decoratively but become integral to the bodies of the objects themselves, creating strata of color, texture, and embedded meaning. Each piece is fired just once, and at lower temperatures, reflecting an ethos of energy-conscious making and structural ingenuity.
The title of the exhibition—We Are Walking, Talking Minerals—draws from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, a key text in contemporary eco-philosophy. Bennett challenges the idea of inanimate matter, proposing instead that all things possess a kind of liveliness. Kotoula’s pieces, many perched on leg-like appendages, seem to walk this line between the inert and the animate. They suggest a post-human archaeology—fragments from an unknown future or remnants of a slow, geological metamorphosis.
Kotoula was a finalist in the fifth edition of the Officine Saffi Award and was awarded the Officine Saffi Special Prize in May 2024, a recognition intended to promote and support innovative practices in contemporary ceramics. Her work challenges us to consider not just what ceramics can be, but how we live with materials, waste, and time itself. This spirit of transformation is closely aligned with the mission of Fondazione Officine Saffi, one of Europe’s most progressive centers for contemporary ceramics.
We Are Walking, Talking Minerals is on view through August 1st at Fondazione Officine Saffi.
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