Premiering Terra Ceràmica, the international ceramic-performance festival in l’Alcora
The “Reial Fàbrica de loza fina y porcelana” was the location of this international festival dedicated to action art with a ceramic perspective.
The international performance festival Terra Ceràmica premiered on June 1st, 2024, with excellent attendance. It displayed an exceptional selection of performance projects, all related to ceramics.
Lovers of ceramics and art in general enjoyed this innovative proposal at the Reial Fàbrica de Ceràmica de l’Alcora, the beautiful headquarters of this proposal curated by local artist Ana Beltrán Porcar. More than a hundred people enjoyed this meeting that approached three great interdisciplinary projects by admirable national and international artists in our region.
The audience appreciated the intimate and warm proposal of the artists Verónica Moar and Paula Pintos, who, with “Entre Cántara e Càntir,” recalled those ceramic jugs with which mothers of yesteryear collected water. The Galician artists presented a moving proposal that brought closer, through music and sound, the pottery culture from Buño and Alcora. This performance shook each spectator who vibrated with the emotion of Pintos’ voice while Moar made us feel the energy of water, of carrying it and sharing it, as a source of care and community. A return to tradition, to the ceramic essence, to the essence of the group, and to humanity.
After enjoying the tour inside the factory with the artists Moar and Pintos, attendees explored the Reial patio, where the next action took place. Alexandra Engelfriet presented her performance “la Reial”, which captivated the audience, who was hypnotized by her movements and her chromatic, undulating, and vigorous ritual in which she became paint and brush at once. Engelfriet transports the slip, showing us the varieties of clay from Alcora’s land through its tones. She makes us immerse ourselves with her in this heavy bath of matter that becomes a single mass with her dance and that generates yet another piece: a pictorial work on a wall. This work tells us about strength, time, and introspection, with the silence of the audience that can feel the artist’s breathing and the heaviness of the clothes bathed in mud. She also helps us think about the aging process, with this repetitive ritual—that piece that remains permanently, and we see it cracking and falling apart.
After an interval enlivened by “10 minutes”, in which each attendee was able to exchange opinions about the cycle and, above all, have time to assimilate the experiences shared by partaking of impressions between artists, attendees and organizers, the action was resumed with the performance by Las Chicas del Barro.
Tanit Mora and Irene Fernández aroused laughter from the audience at first, leading us to reflect on the aesthetic criticism that is made about our bodies. In “Cos(i)ficades”, las Chicas del Barro told us about fashion, the pressure to be pleasant, and the aesthetic canon. They also made us question how this reality affects our lives. Through circus action, narrative and smiles, they showed us another form of performance with which this first edition of the Terra Ceràmica festival arrived to its end.
Alcora Ceramics Museum managed this project with Eladi Grangel as director, who is committed to bringing the ceramic avant-garde to this city, providing a balance between historical recovery, with proposals such as the restoration of the Reial Fábrica, and contemporaneity, with projects such as Terra Ceràmica. The museum team, together with Inés Peris and Tere Artero, provided everything for the project’s needs: materials, monitoring, and reinforcement. The city council also collaborated with other institutions to make a project of this magnitude possible. It is worth highlighting the presence of the Dutch consul in Valencia, Daan Hirs, who enjoyed the event.
With great diversity, Beltrán Porcar proposed these three actions to open a festival with a vocation for permanence. Three actions showed the plurality of performance and the strength of ceramics that expands from its manual, utilitarian, sculptural, and artistic work, contributing to its movement, reflection, and empathy that embodied action gives it. The curating of this festival is based on the interest of its curator, Ana Beltrán, in collaboration and breaking down obstacles to bring together ideas by presenting a communicative proposal that can reach any type of audience.
With this international festival of ceramics performance, Beltrán showed a broad vision of performance with three very different proposals: “Entre Cántaro y Càntir” by Moar and Pintos is a close, poetic project of calm beauty and great subtlety, evoking the relationship between cultures. Engelfriet’s performance brought us closer to the most conceptual contemporaneity, a proposal that went to the profound sensitivity of the artist, which starts from the entrails and sensations of movement and matter. “Cos(i)ficades” by Las Chicas del Barro provided a more theatrical staging, with a speech transmitted through the bodily challenge of acrobatics. They all showed the possibility of clay, ceramics, and “earth”, unifying matter with the body, movement, and action.
For more information about this event, visit the Museu de Ceramica de l’Alcora’s page.
Photography by J. Iserte
