SMCK Magazine's goal is to make art lovers understand the history and potential of jewellery as an art medium. It strives to bridge art and craft disciplines, to discuss contemporary social practices, and make artists aware of market basics. The magazine also serves as a podium for indies and outsiders - gallerists, curators, artists - to address interdisciplinary art directions, sharing stories of failure and success, and showing readers different cultural perspectives on how to appreciate and use art.
It's a difficult task to make the art-loving public familiar with the amazing history, creative potential, and emotional value of the medium of jewellery. This requires knowledge, persistence, reflection, and strategy. It's easy to copy themes from the discourse of the 1990s and paste them into the 2020s.
However, the challenges that inspire artists nowadays have more to do with major armed conflicts and cold wars, democracy and constitutional rights, hygienic totalitarianism and speech control, integration and citizenship, religion, identity, tradition, faith, civil activism, and environmental protection than sex, drugs, girl power, and "PC".
Christoph Ziegler and Loukia Richards (SMCK Magazine publisher and Editor-In-Chief respectively) ambition to make contemporary art approachable and understandable.
Visual artists themselves, Ziegler and Richards (ZLR Betriebsimperium) curate exhibitions, teach specialized workshops for art professionals and art aficionados/as, and offer residencies (FaveLAB) for international artists, designers, makers and art lovers in Greece.