Introduction
“[We need] multiple practices of knowing, from vernacular to official science and draw inspiration from both the arts and sciences to work across genres of observation and storytelling.”1
On their first visit to the island of Sifnos in the summer of 1966, artist and architect Cosmas Xenakis (1925-1984), and his wife Ariadne Xenakis (1924-2015), began collecting what they termed handmade functional ceramics.i At that time domestic ceramic utensils such as cooking pots and hand-forged agricultural implements were still made and used across the island, and the couple recognised in them a living record of everyday knowledge that formal histories had largely ignored.
Over the following decades the collection grew to encompass several distinct categories of object, each tied to a particular rhythm of island life:
- Cooking pots and vessels for daily domestic use
- Hand-forged agricultural implements
- Large storage jars kept in the old thimonià
Each object was documented in place before it was moved, so that its relationship to the building and to the other tools around it would not be lost. This attention to context is what distinguishes the collection from a simple assembly of artefacts, and it is what allows us to read the objects as evidence of a way of working rather than as isolated curiosities.
Material and method
The study that follows reads these objects both as artefacts and as evidence of a way of working. It draws on interviews, photographs taken on site, and the makers’ own accounts, and it treats each of these sources as partial — a fragment of a larger practice that no single method can fully recover.
By holding the vernacular and the scholarly side by side, the collection invites us to think again about what counts as knowledge, and about who is entitled to produce it.2