We will visit the current exhibition at the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich and let ourselves be inspired by the works of Marie-José Crespin as well as the manyfold materials she uses for her unique necklaces, which tell stories from many places and times, condensed along a string.
Following the visit we’ll have a picknick by the lake and who likes enjoys a swim – weather permitting (otherwise it will be an apéro riche indoors).
Please let me know beforehand if you plan on coming! (info@praesent.studio)
Glass beads from Arabia or Murano, stone beads from the Neolithic age, corals, shells, and vertebrae from a snake’s backbone—the materials Marie-José Crespin uses to make her magnificent necklaces are so diverse, so fundamentally different and yet similar. On the one hand, these colliers (necklaces) are pieces of jewelry. Yet they can also be seen as little research projects, each in its own right. They combine products of living and inanimate nature with the sometimes wondrous, sometimes terrible history of trade relations that have shaped the African continent for centuries.
Marie-José Crespin was born in Benin and now lives on the Island of Goree, a central hub of the transatlantic slave trade. She comes from an African-French family of judges and lawyers and recently served as a constitutional judge at the Conseil Constitutionnel, the Supreme Court of Senegal. Crespin has been making colliers since her youth.