Testing Corner was born from a common desire of 3 creatives located around the world, to come together to collaborate remotely: Gabriela Garcia (Brazil), Veronica Tran (Australia), and Julia Bertolaso (Spain). With the desire to create a community through collaborative and creative processes.
As life compels us to find our place in the world, we discover ourselves through interactions with others and the environment.
The project was initiated through Testing Grounds’ Public Art Park during the Melbourne Fringe Festival in 2022. After a period of research around the broader context of material, food, and fire, the idea evolved into a project centering around an open-source kiln, called Testing Corner. The firing process and construction of the kiln are what make it open and accessible, disseminated through printed media during the festival days, and it is also available through digital documentation.
Created to collaborate with communities and various creative fields, the project was built to form a community of people looking to create their tools responding to their contextual needs within the practice of ceramic making and allowing us to be more independent yet communal.
This new iteration of the Testing Corner project invites you today, to engage in making together, while fostering warmth, small-scale experimentation, and most profoundly, a sense of autonomy in creating our tools, sharing knowledge, and building networks.
Testing Corner's tacit and playful approach encourages to connect with the materiality of our world, while making the practice of making and the knowledge acquired in the processes more accessible, keeping it alive for generations to come.
We document everything we do and share this knowledge with everyone.
This is why we believe in building an open and live archive of everything we do in this project, hoping to connect, discuss and encourage contribution and open source practices.
Our approach is process-driven, which means we focus more on everything there is to learn from collectively making and testing.
Sharing is caring. We aim to constantly contribute to the community and hear all voices. Together we learn faster and discover autonomy, and resilience for tomorrow’s challenges.
Scan this QR code to see this workshop presentation:
<aside> 💡 15 min Introduction
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Today, we will craft your own small-scale oven model using clay.
<aside> 💡 20 min Ideation
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To do this, we will first draw inspiration from a living archive of traditional oven-making and their origins.