Here is the text Hannah Vicary wrote for my currnet exhibition at OURS in Lisbon, a cultural space created by Art Historian Laura Käding and Musician Richie Hawtin. The event is part of Lisbon Design Week 2025.
Star Resonance is a first Lisbon solo exhibition by Polish born German artist, Witold Riedel.
At its heart, Star Resonance is a meditation on connection. Riedel asks us to look beyond the surface of things, beyond forms, interventions, and the boundaries we draw between man and nature and to recognise the deeper unity that binds us all. Every material in this space, every object and organism, even the artist themselves, is part of a continuous flow of energy and matter. The idea of “resonance” with the stars becomes the cosmic matter running through the exhibition: an invitation to see ourselves not as separate, but as fundamentally intertwined with everything around us.
Riedel’s work guides us through the journeys of materials, objects, and lifeforms, prompting us to question our relationships with them. The title, “Star Resonance”, points directly to a cosmic connection, which is the true focal point of all the work presented here.
The show brings together objects, drawings, and living organisms, some created as vessels, some as pure expressions of art.
The “grown drawing” (2025), is made with inks from diesel pollution collected from trucks in Delhi, combined with ink made of burned wood from Japan. The ink’s origins trace back to ancient forests and plankton that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, this carbon is now circulating as pollution, then as pigment, and now as art. The paper, made from cotton, is itself a product of sunlight, water, and air, transformed through photosynthesis.
Several of the wood objects presented in the show are in various states of refinement or decay. The presentation table, a refined design object, and the tree fragment borrowed from Monsanto Forest both began as living trees, breathing in carbon dioxide, drinking water, absorbing sunlight, and releasing oxygen, a gas integral to the air that we breathe. Even now, the tree fragment continues to be the home to mosses, insects, and fungi, a living testament to the ongoing dance of life and decay.
The ceramic works, hand-crafted and fired in an electric kiln with energy from the sun.The clay comes from places significant to the artist, Silesia (Poland), Germany, and from a friend’s farm in Setubal. The clay is shaped, combined, and transformed through ancient and modern techniques. In some instances, the clays are combined and then carved in a process called “kurinuki”, Riedel learned the process from Japanese Raku Master Kyoshitsu Sasaki. Riedel challenges the processes further by infusing the clay with materials like salt or using clay that is mixed with paper pulp or seeds. The objects are intentionally allowed to melt or break or even explode, often pushing them beyond a stable state. To which they are then further adjusted, often refired, reglazed and refined. The artist embraces the transformation through this process, each firing is a collaboration with forces which are out of our control.
Some objects are glazed with gold, a material forged not in our sun, but in the cataclysmic collisions of neutron stars, cosmic events that seeded our planet with this precious element. The gold is applied using natural pine resin, which burns away to leave a permanent, elemental mark.
In every aspect, “Star Resonance” invites viewers to contemplate the interconnectedness of all things. The materials are not inert, they are participants in a vast, ongoing exchange of energy and matter. We, too, are part of this network: carbon-based lifeforms, shaped by the same forces that shape the world around us.
Riedel’s vision resonates deeply with the concept of cosmotechnics, the idea that our technologies, philosophies, ways of making and being are always intertwined with the world around us. Riedel’s work reminds us that every act of creation is an act of participation in the universe’s unfolding, and that when we strip away the distinctions between self and other, human and nature, we find a fundamental unity, a shared energy, a star resonance, connecting us all.
Even the sound in the gallery, a recording that Riedel made of birds in London in May, becomes part of this web of resonance. The birds’ song, woven into the air, echoing through the space, reminds us that connection is not only visual or material, but also vibrational and ephemeral.
There is a small collection of unique glazed clay cups which can be purchased and used to drink sake that is served at the gallery.
The exhibition is part of the Lisbon Design Week and is the first exhibition in the OURS cultural space at the edge of Estrela Park. OURS is a project by Musician Richie Hawtin and Art Historian Laura Käding. The Exhibition runs from the 28th of May through the 1st of June 2025.
Photographs by Matias Garcia
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