International Art Ceramics Colony

The colony is where Zlakusa pottery stops being only cookware. Ceramicists from Serbia and abroad come to the village, work with the local clay and the local technique, and make pieces of their own. It has run without a break for more than two decades.

When

1—11 August

Where

Zlakusa, City of Uzice

Organiser

"Keramika Zlakusa" association

Led by

Sofija Bunardzic, painter and ceramicist

Running since

the early 2000s

Editions

more than 25

What the colony does

Participants work in the village for ten days, beside the potters and with their clay. The result is not a run of cookware but contemporary work shaped by an old craft — which is the point of the colony: to show that a technique centuries old still has something to say outside the kitchen.

For the village this is a different kind of visibility from the fair. The fair gathers the trade; the colony puts it in front of an art audience and brings in people who think about clay differently from a household making a baking bell.

How it started

Until 2009 one of the two international ceramics colonies was part of the Autumn in Zlakusa festival. It then became independent and took its August dates, while a pottery fair — Loncarijada — was started within Autumn instead.