Curator, art historian, writer Chus Martínez and writer and curator Filipa Ramos bring together a group of artists who have been using clay, pottery and ceramics to imagine, project and shape the world they live in.

Some may associate clay, pottery and ceramics to tradition, and tradition to the past. Some may associate technology, digital communication and data with the new, and the new with the future. What if the future is only a technology as old and unusual as clay? What if clay is a matter that renews itself constantly and gives time its unpredictable configurations?

What if clay is the future and the future is clay? And if the feet of clay only reveal a vulnerability because the rest of the body is made of a different material? And if the feet of clay are actually rooting people to the earth, connecting them through the same matter? And if feet of clay are a way to establish a post-technological communication that requires no webs, no networks, no cables; only our many, one, two, eight, twenty feet and some clay?

These are some of the questions and enigmas addressed by curators Chus Martínez and Filipa Ramos, who brought together a group of artists who have been using clay, pottery and ceramics in an exhibition entitled Feet of Clay, presented at Galeria Municipal do Porto in 2021. Like clay, the project has now been moulded into book format, bringing together exclusive texts and interviews with the participating artists: Neïl Beloufa, Isabel Carvalho, Gabriel Chaile, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Formabesta (Salvador and Juan Cidrás), Tamara Henderson, Ana Jotta and Eduardo Navarro.

Texts by Neïl Beloufa, Isabel Carvalho, Gabriel Chaile, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Formabesta (Salvador e Juan Cidrás), Tamara Henderson, Ana Jotta, Chus Martínez, Eduardo Navarro, Filipa Ramos.

When she started writing the Corona Tales, Chus Martínez had been weighing how people and the media were addressing the outbreak of the virus as an unprecedented disaster. One possible contribution, as curator and writer, would be to write a short story a day and post it on an Instagram account that many could access…

Martínez grew up with her grandparents till she was four, and so did her cousin, while both their parents migrated to a big city—hers to Barcelona, his to Basel—to work. The grandparents' childhood was marked by extreme poverty: the Spanish flu left the grandfather orphan of both parents; the grandmother's family, from the same small village in the north west coast of Spain, was also forced to encourage their children to help and work for money. These circumstances were reflected by them—with no trace of sorrow or bitterness.

The recovery was so slow that the author's mother could not afford to attend school and it was only when she married that she and her father enrolled a night course. The stories about these two generations, posted daily, from Basel, around 7pm, offered a chance for gathering, if just virtually, demanding to identify vulnerabilities, how the COVID-19 crisis was being generalized, and how to research ways of doing. Accompanied for the first time in this book by new imagery, they provide tools for reflecting in the past and present tense.

Published December 2020