What are you wearing? – Jewellery! was the motto of a workshop held in July 2000 „Unter den Kolonnaden“ in Heiligendamm on the Baltic Sea.
Four artists; Michaela Sadlowski, Valentina Seidel, Ulrike Solbrig and Susan Pietzsch, each worked out their personal interpretation of “jewellery” in a broader sense. Against their background of very different artistic working methods, objects, photographs and video recordings were created during the workshop. Jewellery was staged as an artistic medium and explored as a means of expression. With the project “What are you wearing? – Jewellery! SCHMUCK2 generally paved the way for collaborative approaches between different artistic media – in this case a jewellery designer, contemporary artists and photographers.

At the end of the workshop the results were presented to the public in Heiligendamm and Bad Doberan and found their way into further exhibitions.

Ulrike Solbrig
Subway Map…to be worn on the side, through a belt loop, for instance. The map is soft, colorful, light, and in a certain way without form and orientation. This lack of orientation resembles the reality of going by subway, because there we are only able to locate ourselves with the aid of schematic maps. This ornament is a translation from 2-dimensional subway maps into a real net. The knots represent the single stations, the colored threads the subway lines. The knots build a bridge from merely an abstract representation of thought to tangible, reproducible stations. Similar to the pearls of a rosary, one can follow the knots with the hand, just as one’s body travels between the subway stations. If you go by subway you are part of the system, quite the opposite of holding this little map in your hand. The map is in many ways similar to a talisman: as small representation of an object one can not handle – an amulet built of knots. Either take the map along while travelling by subway or keep it as a souvenir of whatever city you like best.

Michaela Sadlowski
I found this place fascinating and special where the project What are you wearing? – Jewellery! took place: in the momentarily empty white town by the sea, Heiligendamm. This place by the Baltic Sea, which is full of history, doesn’t only show traces of the past on and in the white villas standing by the water but it is also nature which bears those traces. Near the villas is a wood close to the cliffs. This wood, typically called “ghost wood”, has something very mystic and weird about itself, it seems very full of soul. Interestingly enough, visitors have over decades immortalized themselves in this wood by carving and scratching various signs into the bark of the trees. Also I found several sensuous and interesting shapes in the bark. Those shapes I have cast in latex and I projected them onto the human body by transforming the latex casts into wearable pieces of jewellery. I took photographs of the jewellery on naked skin so that they seem like distortions on the body, making a possible history of the individual body visible.

Susan Pietzsch und Valentina Seidel
The work ‘Cutie Pie’ is a collaboration between jewellery designer Susan Pietzsch and photo artist Valentina Seidel. Bodies were processed with various materials from the food sector (icing, candy), and in this process new images and definitions of jewellery were created. The proximity to tatoos and cake decorations is intentional, their transience integral to the works. The bodies become macro landscapes, projection surfaces of erotic desires and oral pleasures, expressions of longing and constructs of transience. The documentation was created by means of photography and video, it shows an autonomous artistic interpretation of the works created.

Funded by the Ministry of Culture of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Cultural Office of the City of Bad Doberan, Baltic Color in Bargeshagen/Rostock and the Volks- und Raiffeisenbank eG Bad Doberan.