IDEA
THE MAGIC OF MATTER
Matter has always been more than a utilitarian substance — it has been endowed with meaning, emotion, and story. Objects became amulets, talismans, vessels of memory, bridges between the physical and the spiritual. Yet as civilization evolved, our needs and expectations changed, and matter gradually lost its aura of the sacred, giving way to tools, technologies, and production.
Today — in the digital era, dominated by images, data, and simulations — a fundamental question returns: what allows matter to move us still? To become meaningful, exceptional? What hidden magic enables it to resist the pull of the virtual and regain its significance and allure?
Amber — with its organic origin, luminous depth, and inclusions suspended between geological time and human imagination — is a striking example of a substance whose magnetism has endured for thousands of years. But how do we perceive the natural world today, in an age shaped by technology? How are we to interpret amber now, when matter becomes increasingly virtual, processable, generative? Where does its uniqueness lie — in its structure, its chemical and physical processes, or perhaps in the story told by the creator?
The theme “The Magic of Matter” is meant to provoke reflection on our contemporary relationship with material, to inspire the search for these singular qualities — this elusive magic — and to encourage experimentation on the borderlands of craft, art, and technology. Here, amber may become not merely a raw material but a field of exploration — a substance open to deconstruction and transformation, to dialogue with metal, light, sound, parametric form, or algorithmic logic.
The magic of amber may reveal itself through responses to touch, temperature, or movement; through juxtapositions with synthetic materials; through forms that employ 3D printing, photogrammetry, AI, or augmented reality.
“The Magic of Matter” also invites us to question the very definition of material: can it be light? Shadow? Sound? Data? Intention? Must amber serve as a stable element, or can it become a module, an ephemeral component, the starting point of a process that evolves over time?
We encourage bold formal and conceptual exploration: an investigation into the nature of structure, decay, fusion, and transformation; a willingness to break traditional hierarchies between the natural and the technological, the soft and the hard, the durable and the ephemeral — to redefine how jewelry is traditionally perceived.
We are seeking projects that do more than adorn — works that communicate, encode, transform. In which meaning emerges between matter and the human being — in experience, gesture, relationship. Works that reveal the contemporary magic of amber and its potential for the future.