Pith® Stories presents - A Bunch of Broken Pots.

For the 5th instalment of Pith Stories, we present A Bunch of Broken Pots. A short film born of the collaboration between Argentinian Buenos Aires-based director Macarena Rubio and Argentinian London-based ceramic artist Gaspar Gorodisch. Together, they’ve brought years of personal history into a single story. One where the act of breaking is embraced, and where cracks don't signal an ending, but tell the story of a transformation.

We sat down with Gaspar and Macarena as they opened up about the process of making the film, the friendship that made it possible, and what it means to rebuild from what breaks.

Guadalupe Alvarez: Before we dive into the film details, I'd love to start by asking how you guys met and what brought you to collaborate.

Gaspar Gorodisch: Maca is one of my seven oldest friends. I think there's a category of friends that transcend memory. Like they've been there since before memory was a thing. And Maca is one of those friends. Along the way, we took different paths, and in a very weird way, we met again many years later. It was like picking up a relationship where no time had passed.

Macarena Rubio: It's like we always spoke the same language. So after many years, when we reunited, we didn't need to introduce ourselves again. We thought, “Now that we're both in the artistic world, let's understand what each one is doing in their own path and try to collaborate in a way that we can make our craft grow.” Film and ceramics have nothing to do with each other conceptually, and at the same time, so much. We started to find those connections, and that's how ‘Broken Pots’ came through.

GG: Adding to that, I’ve always had this huge admiration for Maca’s capability of synthesis, for the way she can transmit feelings, make words flow into each other, and the relationship she builds between sound, image, and music. In fact, when we started talking about potentially collaborating, I was giddy inside. I felt honoured that one of my thoughts would be seen by Maca.

MR: Aw, shut up. I think this conversation is going to be very interesting, almost like therapy. Because Gaspi and I are going to say this stuff out loud, which we've never really discussed in this way before.

GA:  How did you get to where you are today, Maca? How did you become a director, and what brought you to the point of directing this film?

MR: I've been directing for almost 10 years now. I went to film school and started as a producer; I’ve been working in advertising for the past few years, in addition to my personal projects.

I was actually shooting a commercial in Albania right before I went to London. So I arrived with this intense energy from doing a very big campaign, and when suddenly we were four people, in a little studio, with my friend since we were three years old, I brought it down to the point of, “Let's have fun with this.” So I not only connected with that feeling, but also with the possibility of saying something without any intermediary, just by trying to show something very real from us, something that reflects what you want to say as an artist.

Now, this film took form in a very amorphous way. It was made in the opposite way of a normal process. The script came later, when I sat down with the material and started to see everything we shot. Then I started to write, Gaspi started to write, and we started to share ideas of how we could do something really honest, and how, by exploring something from ourselves, we could transmit something to people that they’d resonate with. 

GA: And that comes through immediately. The film really pulls you in and makes you submerge into the message. It really leaves you feeling something after it’s over. 

MR: I wanted to be a piece that you could feel. Something where you could maybe close your eyes and already understand what was going on, rather than trying to put everything in the visuals. 

"When losing the capability of fantasising positively about what you can do, one way of bypassing that I found is drawing, because it gives you enough time to let the thought happen. To sort of relinquish control…just follow the hand with intention, knowing the shapes, but just sort of really not putting any outside pressures that at times I've had with clay."

GA: Throughout the film, you give us an understanding of Gaspar's story, but I'd love to know, Gaspar, when did your relationship with clay and ceramics begin, and how did that inspire the film?

GG: I arrived at working with clay at a time when I had lost what I thought my future was going to be, my studies, where I was going to live, all of those things had been questioned during a time when I was taking my biggest step. And because of that, I was really struggling with anxiety and with coping with most things. So my therapist recommended trying something like ceramics. I thought it was a very stupid recommendation on his end. I left the therapy session and got a message from a friend of my mom, Analia, inviting me to her friend’s ceramic studio. It was the second time in my life I was hearing the word ceramic, and both were on the same day; there has got to be something, I thought. So I went, and that’s when I touched clay for the first time. When I sat on the wheel, it was the closest thing to what I think a religious experience might be. That’s when we met.

GG: When I got into clay, it's not like I solved all of my issues or I was fixed. In fact, I still had a few more accidents to go through, and at different points, I lost the ability to work with clay again. I tore tendons and ligaments in my hand, and later had two other traumatic knee injuries and other surgeries. However, two and a half years ago, before stopping everything again after the latest knee injury, I decided not to run away from what I was physically embodying, and instead chose to embrace it fully. I started owning the way I work more than ever, and started learning how to ask for help.

GA: What does your artistic process usually look like?

GG: I think my artistic process has become an amalgamation of smaller processes. At times, my practice becomes anything that the body is able to do that day, with not a lot of judgment. I like keeping engaged with the thoughts I might be feeling at those times. In the smallest of gestures, I will look and take photos with my phone out the window, draw on my notebook, write words, and in the biggest and most expansive way, I'm throwing big pieces on the wheel and altering them. We never know what will create movement.

Through my journey, instead of fighting with frustration, I opted to embrace it. When limitation is inevitable, I embrace it and observe it. I used to do a lot of functional work, I used to love the repetition, although there just not too much repetitive throwing at the moment, nor in the near future, I don’t think. 

GG: The way I learned to embrace limitations is to accept, negotiate and adapt where possible. When I realised that working with clay was non-negotiable for my well-being, the ‘how’ became a negotiation. So, I thought, “If I can’t work big, maybe work small; if I can’t throw many, I’ll make less, and so on with every limitation I could sense.”

GA: There's something so empowering about that. Were there other essential evolutions in your practice that played a role in that?

GG: Through my journey, when working in the studio was just not physically or circumstantially possible, paper became essential. It was the only constant that I found. Whatever happens, I will be able to have a notebook in my pocket and…do something in it. There's something very reassuring about that. Even if I lost this notebook, I can still have a notebook; if I can’t get one, I can make one. That feels extremely soothing to me. My notebooks hold all the seeds of what I've managed to do once the circumstances changed. 

GA: Now, going a bit deeper into the film, how did the idea of “A Bunch of Broken Pots” originate?

MR: The idea for the film came through when Gaspi showed me this one piece he had done. The one that’s a little ‘Frankenstein’ of many, many pieces, that appears in the short. Because when I saw that piece, having known Gaspar through all the surgeries he’d been through and how he felt like a different person when he came back to the studio after each surgery, I was like, “Hey, these are much more than a bunch of broken pots.” But that only came through because I knew him.

MR: There was also a special moment during his first solo exhibition in Buenos Aires. I was going through my own situation at the time, but I went anyway because I really needed to see it. And in that moment, I felt extremely proud of him because he was able to put everything he had been telling me over the past years into his art. I think that’s when he started to understand, or explore, the idea of ‘breaking as a part of a process’. It was from then on that we started talking a lot about the concept of breaking, which I was also going through in my personal life in a very raw way. So for me, the idea of ‘broken’ and its concept were already very strong, and I had the possibility of understanding that with him. 

GA: How did you decide to portray Gaspar and his work in the film?

MR: It was interesting because it was not like, “Let's do a portrait of you.” It was more, “Let's do something that has to do with the process that you've been understanding, and that we've been talking a lot about.” That’s why you don’t see Gaspi in many shots. For me, the goal was not to give all the information right away. The intention was to leave something open, for it to be short, to show a little insight into what he is going through in this moment, knowing that, as artists, we are always doing a software update. Maybe in two years, Gaspi will be in another place, and he doesn’t feel like talking about his broken pieces.

GG:  I really resonate with what Maca is saying about this being something that reflects a moment in my artistic and personal life. It feels very true to what my life experience has been for the last couple of years, like capturing almost a poem around what I’ve been reflecting upon. In that way, it feels extremely autobiographical. Maca captured a version of my work out of a lot of my reflections that I would have never been able to capture. It transcends me because it’s truly anecdotal that it’s about me and my work. It feels like an excuse to tell this message because I don’t look for pity. I feel like this film doesn't do that. It makes you feel empowered, and it makes you feel like it’s okay. And I think that is beautiful, the fact that I play a part in all this is just a gift.

GA: And when you arrived at his studio for the first time, Maca, how did you go about deciding what to include in the film?

MR: When I arrived for the first time to shoot, I had never been there before. So the first thing I said was, “Okay, show me the pieces. I want to see the pieces first.” He started showing me the pieces, including the Frankenstein one, which was this bunch of broken pots put together. From there, it became about finding the pieces that showed the process that led him to that final one.

But then he told me, “Yeah, and I also have my sketchbooks.” And he had ten of them. I was like, “Oh sh*t, okay, this is kind of personal. Are you really showing me all your sketches?” When I opened them, there were drawings, but also random ideas, and some dark ideas too. Everything was there, and suddenly it felt very intimate to be able to see through those pages.

MR: So we shot them and added it to the film, if you pause—    

GG: Don't pause, don't pause, haha.

MR: Yeah, you will see that there are things written on the edges that had nothing to do with pottery or ceramics, and those were things we wanted to tell in the film. I kind of like those hidden gems, because it felt like that is really what the sketchbooks do in this sense. They kind of become a 360 of your intimacy. And for me, that was very—

GG: Very dangerous.

MR: It’s very beautiful…you should show them at an exhibition, by the way.

GG: Maybe when I'm way older…maybe when I die.

GG: My notebook is open to the most stupid of thoughts and the most brilliant of ideas; it needs to be that way.

GA: It's a space where everything is possible.

GG: 
Yes, every idea has a place to live.

MR: Yeah, it doesn't judge you.

GA: Previously, Maca spoke about capturing a specific part of your process to convey a bigger message. Gaspar, is there a common theme around ‘instability’ that runs through all of your work, beyond just this film? 

GG: I do see a common thread in my work, whether it’s intentional or not, I'm not too sure right now. 

I’ve been inevitably thinking about subjects such as ‘perceived instability,’ the feeling of being unstable, what ‘brokenness’ is, and I think it comes through the work, from the ones that look the least broken to the ones that are the most obviously destroyed.

The contrast of having something very precise, pristine, intentional, derived from an obsessive process that is strikingly unstable next to something extremely organic and raw that is incredibly stable, connects both of them and is stronger because of it. So morphologically, everything is very different, but I think that is the thread that goes through everything, whether I want it or not.

GA: Finally, was there any realisation or reflection that came through the process of making the film?

MR: I also discovered things about my own process while working on this project. I realised that every process is valid, even though we are always trying to find the perfect one, the one with no flaws.

Also, there was something so interesting that happened when we started to call all the other collaborators, Pablo, Fyras, Nacho, Eric, Bauti, etc. When talking to everyone, it felt very natural how they all resonated with the message and brought their own ideas drawn from the title. I always try to give collaborators as much freedom as possible, so they can create from their best capacities and give the project what it needs. But in this case, it felt very necessary to also add the concept of “all these broken pieces” that then also got integrated to create a new piece, which was this film.

So yeah, I do love that this became such a profound process, and became another reflection of what the short is portraying.

THANK YOU

Gaspar and Maca for trusting us with your film and opening up your worlds to us.

@gg.ceramica

macarenarubio.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guadalupe Alvarez is an industrial designer and co-director of Level Collective. Blending her background in marketing and communication with her love for design, she is passionate about sharing the stories that live behind the work we see.

Pith® Stories: Sharing the extraordinary lives, inspirations and knowledge of the people who bring our books to life.