Melt With You
In Berlin, the path to a diverse community is paved with glass.
In typical Berlin fashion, it all started on a bike. Then again – beginnings are slippery things, hard to pin down. Perhaps we can trace it back to a dinghy making the perilous crossing between Libya and Italy, or even to an Australian artist’s residency in the German capital’s first hot glass studio. But embroidering a beginning onto a story that is still being woven might be an exercise in futility. Maybe we should just enjoy the fact that, once upon a time, someone chose to help a community in need, and a team followed through with action.
This story centers on Berlin Glas, the uberhip city’s first public access hot glass studio. Its founder and managing director, Nadania Idriss, is a Lebanese-American scholar of medieval middle eastern studies. Born in Berkeley, California, Idriss’s extraordinary life path took her to the British Museum, in London, and to a stint at UNESCO, in Paris, before she settled into her niche role of running a nonprofit center for artists crazy enough to work with molten lava.
The studio is nestled within Monopol, a creative campus born out of a former distillery in the north Berlin neighborhood of Reinickendorf. It provides fabrication services for designers, residencies for artists from around the world, and an array of public programs. Over the last two decades, Berlin Glas has pieced together a remarkable glassmaking community in Berlin, so much so that in 2024, the Glass Art Society chose the city for its annual conference site.
Among the international artists who have come to make work in Berlin, Australian Ruth Oliphant was sponsored by Bullseye Glass for a 2014 residency. Once she arrived at Berlin Glas, it was evident that she had ordered far too much glass for her brief time at the studio. Berlin Glas is primarily a furnace glass operation, and in 2014 it had yet to invest in much equipment for other ways of working with glass. Oliphant’s work involves cutting, painting, engraving and layering pieces of glass and then fusing them together in a kiln, or glass oven. Since the orientations of the Berlin Glas kilns were better suited for blown glass objects, she had to shift to smaller scale works than she had planned. Oliphant ended up leaving behind a mountain of materials, hoping the team could find some use for them. But she couldn’t have predicted that her surplus glass would spark and supply a transformative community project.
The intimacy of breaking bread together, layered with the pride of dining from the plate your hands created, is a powerful affirmation at the intersection of craft and community care.
In the early winter of 2015, Germany was in the midst of welcoming over a million refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries. Idriss recalled a pervasive spirit of goodwill in Berlin: “It was such a heartwarming moment, because the community, like, all over Berlin, people just rallied, brought clothes, empty spaces were converted into dormitories. Hotels emptied and gave up rooms. It was super organized, and there were so many NGOs that stepped up, and a lot of artists then got involved.” Francesca Springer, a friend of the Berlin Glas team, felt compelled to join the artists supporting and welcoming refugees. Springer, a kiln-formed glass artist who was transitioning out of her practice to pursue a career in architecture, told Idriss and fellow-kilnformer Bettina Schneider that she wanted to hold fusing classes for the refugee children. But she didn’t have the space, or the glass, or the time to spare to turn her idea into reality.
Idriss immediately volunteered her team and the Berlin Glas studio, as well as Oliphant’s stockpile of unused glass. Schneider and Springer provided Berlin Glas’s staff with a quick-and-dirty lesson in glass fusing, and soon after, the team set out on bicycles to drop off flyers at the refugee housing centers, advertising free fusing classes for kids accompanied by coffee and hot cocoa to set a cozy scene at the glass studio.
On the day of the first workshop, the Berlin Glas studio team prepared meticulously for their guests — materials laid out, coffee and cocoa brewed, smiles and cozy chairs at the ready. No one showed up. Disappointed but not daunted, the team returned to the housing centers to try another approach. Speaking to a woman working at the refugee center, they learned that their target audience wasn’t comfortable traveling far from their home base. “They have no idea where they’re going, no idea what they’re getting into,” she told Idriss. The woman encouraged them to bring a presentation to the center, and find a classroom within walking distance.
The crew followed through, found a space closer to the center, brought their glass along for the ride, and had a successful first workshop, which helped build up trust and word-of-mouth advertising for more. Bullseye’s Lani McGregor heard about the project during a visit to Berlin, and mindful of Oliphant’s minimalist palette, sent Berlin Glas a crate of fusing glass in gloriously kid-friendly bright, primary colors. Once kids began working with saturated opaques, making fused pumpkins and other seasonal projects, the classes soared in popularity. “At one point,” Idriss remembered, “we would be in the room, and the door would crack open, and this arm would come in and drop a baby and disappear! And at first I was like, ‘We're not a babysitting service,’ because then we have this two year old, like, grabbing for shards of glass, yeah? So I went out into the hall to go talk to the parents, and in one of the little dorm rooms, where an entire family would sleep, all of the moms were sitting in a circle, drinking coffee and laughing. And I was like, okay, this is their moment. We’ll figure something out, we’ve got you.”
Glass offers marginalized people “the opportunity of a safe space and time where they can forget a bit about their difficulties.”
In order to serve communities living further from the city center, Idriss commissioned artist Jesse Gunther to design and fabricate a miniature fusing studio on wheels, so that the team could run classes anywhere they had access to a couple of tables, a broom, and a dustpan. Thus, the Kiez Mobil was born. The plucky cart of creativity has been active since 2016, and has allowed Berlin Glas to expand its youth program to include participants from disadvantaged backgrounds as well as kids with developmental disabilities. The focus that working with glass requires, Idriss says, “allows kids to just be kids.”
In 2016, eager for ever more ways to provide support to refugee populations in her community, Idriss led Berlin Glas to form a partnership with Multaka: Museums as Meeting Point. Multaka was launched by Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art in 2015 to train Iraqi and Syrian refugees to become tour guides at state museums. Besides conducting tours in German for the general audience, Multaka guides also provide fellow refugees with tours in their own languages, welcoming and introducing them to Germany’s cultural heritage. According to Idriss, one aspect of the Multaka tours’ approach is particularly special: the guide “picks three or four objects that are their favorites, and engages the people on the tour to discuss how they feel about those objects. The goal of this program is to break down barriers, just to get people to know each other.”
Based on the success of the Kiez Mobil and Berlin Glas’ public classes, Multaka asked Idriss to collaborate by adding a hot glass workshop element to the training. A group of tour guides and attendees would spend one day exploring the museum together, and come to the studio the next day for a hands-on project tied to the works they had seen at the museum. After a day of viewing the spectacularly advanced techniques of mold-blown glass created in medieval middle eastern cultures, for example, participants could make their own molds and then blow into them with the assistance of the Berlin Glas gaffers. Free access to a hot glass class is an alluring perk and, predictably, it drew in a crowd, including lots of local creatives. ‘New Berliners,’ or refugees, would make up about half of the attendees, and the rest would be Germans or longtime expat Berlin residents. “At one fusing workshop,” Idriss recalled, “everyone was going around and introducing themselves. One of the new Berliners was from Syria, and next to her was a woman from Israel.” Instead of worrying about potential conflicts, Idriss, who is known for her boundless optimism, was excited to see these cultures collide. “At the end of that workshop,” she said, “they exchanged phone numbers.” The teamwork and choreography of the hot shop provided a new tool to help the Multaka program bridge cultural and personal divides.
Presenter Jayday Ford demonstrates at Berlin Glas during the 2024 Glass Art Society Conference. Photo: Mike Berger courtesy of the Glass Art Society.
Maylis du Bot, who coordinates Berlin Glas’ youth programs, thinks that glass offers marginalized people “the opportunity of a safe space and time where they can forget a bit about their difficulties, focus on something manual . . . hopefully giving them the confidence that everyone is worth something, and everyone can achieve so much.” Du Bot is an Italo-French artist who works under the name of Ziggy Melvis, and who, for nearly three years, has been helping to expand and evolve the studio’s community impact. Her background is impressively worldly, with degrees in linguistics, design and sculpture from Italy, France and Scotland.
Now working on a masters degree in sculpture in Berlin, she considers community activism as an essential component of her artistic practice. Du Bot discovered the transfixing qualities of molten glass during an internship in Murano, where she worked at a hot shop run solely by women – an experience which, she said, revealed how powerful a teaching tool glass can be.
Before coming to Berlin Glas, Du Bot had also done outreach work with detainees in the French prison system. There, she noticed that male inmates had difficulties in sharing and processing emotions, attributing those challenges to cultural norms and their distillation within the constraints of the carceral system. Now that she has seen glass work its magic on Berlin Glas’ partner communities, she is working towards bringing glass into the institutional setting, where she thinks it could have an outsized impact. “It’s so hard to control this material, and takes a lot of time and experience and repetition. It would be so great for [the inmate] population because you cannot control it - you have to be humble and let the material teach you.”
The goal of this program is to break down barriers, just to get people to know each other.
In the meantime, Du Bot is running an extension of Berlin Glas’ original refugee outreach, a grant-supported project she dubbed ‘Melting Potluck.’ In this monthslong and ongoing program, young women refugees are taught all the ways of working with glass, from fusing to basic glassblowing, and will end up with an entire place setting on which they will share a meal at the end of the series. Working with displaced populations, Du Bot realized that, “for them to open up and to feel safe, we have to share a meal, or at least a coffee or something. Humanity is to share a meal with someone else, you know?” The intimacy of breaking bread together, layered with the pride of dining from the plate your hands created, is a powerful affirmation at the intersection of craft and community care.
Du Bot’s gift for languages has come in very handy as a facilitator for these programs, and now she feels that all of her previous experiences were bringing her towards this role. “One month, we had two twin sisters from Turkey [in the program], speaking very little English and no German at all,” she recalled. “I asked them how to say ‘nice.’ They told me ‘iiy.’ Then I asked them how to say VERY VERY nice, and they told me ‘iiyy’ again. We laughed. I went on teaching them about glassmaking, me talking in English, sometimes French, sometimes Italian, and them answering in Turkish. Our dialogue was absurd, although very fluid.The whole session went by, and it was only at the end that I realized we were not speaking the same language, although we all understood what we were saying.”
“Making has the power to transform lives, communities, and futures. This series will explore the impact of maker communities from around the world, from a diverse array of media and methods. As we face the modern challenges of climate change, authoritarianism, and inequality, how are the world’s artists and designers putting their wealth of creative problem-solving skills to work? What responsibility do we have as makers to craft a better world, and what responsibility does the rest of the world have to support our artists and creatives?”
— Jennifer Hand
Berlin Glas teammates Luke Holden and Viviane Stroede at the Berlin Glas furnace. Photo: Mary Barfield courtesy of the Glass Art Society.