Ceramic Beach, part 2: Getting to the shore, CERAMIC BEACH HISTORY = concept explanation
After a deep dive in New Nature we’ve finally reached the ceramic beach =)
Actually this concept started at the very first step of my research when I was looking at the pure environmental changes in new nature: all those ceramic wastelands and debris and how it affects landscapes. Then thinking of debris I got the strong association with coral debris which amazed me so much during stay in Australia.
Once I was there in Coral sea on one of the reef islands and was absolutely stunned by the beach, as it was completely made of coral debris. There was no send and almost any stones, just this dead corals’ bodies which were so beautiful by themselves but then had another amazing feature. As corals are empty inside when hitting one another they make some sound completely different from the stones. And when you have the whole beach in corals every wave moves hundreds of them producing the most amazing sound of waves ever. And most amazingly in a way it really sounds like porcelain. But then with climate change, raise of temperature and acidification of ocean corals are dying. So one day we won’t have any more coral beaches with their amazing sound…
And on the other hand we have ceramic debris which cannot be recycled in a really efficient way. (more importantly for me: if it gets recycled, then all the cultural traces are erased from it and goes back to the natural dust) So there are dumps of beautiful pottery just waiting for archaeologist of the future. But sometimes when they meet the sea, magic happens. Beach covered with shards may be dangerous to walk but after it is polished by the sea it is beautiful and smooth. So there are people collecting this “sea pottery” for décor in the house.
My idea was to invite people to recycle their pottery in a new unusual way. They can bring broken ceramics and in the end it will become beautiful sea pottery. With some help of crushing robots and a huge artificial whirlpool of course making also the process look cool and entertaining!=) Of course this is a very imaginary and humorous concept, but in a way it talks about serious issues of how people are changing landscapes, the role of ceramics industry in it and about the destiny of poor corals too. Now the point is that this concept operates mainly on “step 1” of my research dealing with environmental issues, but I would like it to take also from the “step 4” which is talking about ceramics storing cultural values. So now I’m working on the ways to distinguish the resulting beach from the dump, so that people would think of it not as a wasteland, but a treasure land. One of the options is working on the sound features of ceramics as porcelain really sounds similar to corals, but then I’d like to explore more possibilities.
Some graphic to explain the story of Ceramic Beach:
First the oceans appear on Earth, but millions years passed before the life. During Cambrian coral polyps came to live with many other species. Eventually their debris formed the coral beaches, but there were no man yet to appreciate its beauty. But when humans finally evolved it didn’t take them long to start building new environment including the pottery. This system was still sustainable in a way till the Industrial Revolution and then everything started to accelerate, and people affected the planet in a way not letting many species to stay on it. And the corals were included. So today the population of them is decreasing rapidly and by the year 2100 probably most of them will be dead. The beaches though will still stay there for maximum other thousand years, when finally all the debris will get crushed into the smaller and smaller pieces forming just sand. But at the same time the amount of ceramic waste will only grow. And at this moment the offshore ceramic recycling platforms will come to play…
An awesome feature of new beaches is the possibility to define their characteristics so that they never will hurt your feet, for example.
And here is how it can be done: again in the experiments phase I understood that ceramics is different and can be sorted into the pieces which look good, others that are nice to touch due to some relief or else — sound good (porcelain especially). And of course there are various combinations of them. So the first step is sorting pieces according to this features. Second step — sorting by colour. Third is crushing it into smaller size debris, which again will define the qualities of resulting beach and can be selected by the imaginary client. Last step is polishing which can be measured in the “years in the sea” equivalent.
In the end each beach can have absolutely unique combination of characteristics, it can be a black beach which is nice to touch, or yellow and sounding good, or super luxurious porcelain beach made of the traditional china, etc. And the proper parameters can be set to fit each specific location.
All the complex of crushing and polishing is situated in the sea. It takes energy from the wave turbines which help to accumulate and focus the power of the sea and therefore to accelerate process. And it’s huge and as for me supercool to see and can be an attraction for tourists ^^ Not to mention the thing I told already about changing also the seascape, not only land…
Probably I could go on experimenting exploring other possibilities, like building a little ceramic crushing and polishing machine, but I believe that it’s better to start something new :)
However if you know someone with a budget for entropy accelerators, please, let me know *_*
Ceramic Beach is my project developed during Ceramic Futures 1.0 — an online/offline workshop and competition which in 2013 involved students of 4 European schools: Glasgow School of Art, Politecnico di Milano, Abadir Academy, IED Rome. Full info can be found athttp://www.ceramicfutures.com/1/
