In collaboration with UNFOLD and Max Hornacker
Ongoing project of the Stirrup Vessel produced by the pre-Columbian Chimu culture of Peru.
Before the tragic fire of Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, researchers 3D scanned a big quantity of the now lost collection to obtain an additional input of them. After the tragedy, the possibility to re-materialise the digital ghosts looking at the original manufacturing traditions while relating them with contemporary techniques emerged.
Regarding the material-technical history of the Peruvian vessel itself. It’s fundamental to know that stirrup vessels were produced with clay molds. Molds reproduce copies, and 3D printers reproduce copies too, but from a scan.
Sumed up, machines may seem far away from craft processes practiced by pre-Columbian cultures. About the humanity of ceramic 3D printers, Stacey Jo Scott stated in her article Ephemeral Materials, “This machine is performing a most basic human impulse: to materialize an idea through language, an action as old as civilization. In digital fabrication, that impulse is made literal. Idea becomes language, becomes code, becomes form. These machines, like 3D printers, were engineered to mimic human action.”
Not much is known about the provenance of this piece besides that it was a gift from France to Brazil’s founder and first ruler, the Portuguese emperor Pedro de 1st. The fact that this vessel was produced in the north coast of Peru, to later on arrive to France in some way, and afterwards, return to Brazil in South America, is already the story of artefacts traveling due to colonialism and lootings. In this case, the stirrup vessel traveled to Italy and for the rescue of cultural heritage through non-common finishing traditions, like pit firing.
Max Hornacker, who has been practicing the technique of pit-firing in the last years, applied this final layer to a couple of 3D-printed vessels. The technique of pit-firing consists on adding the vessels fo a fire lighted up in a hole on the ground. At the final stage of the fire, the vessels are covered with organic matter and the oxygen is reduced, which would originally add the black color to stirrup vessels of the Chimu culture.
