A house located in Urdesa shelters inside a small factory and a shop with products for the home made of ceramics.
Login to Elsaller is connecting with those little details made with love. This design house, which opened its doors last November in Urdesa (Guayaquil), is not only presented as a new cultural meeting point for Guayaquil, but as a welcoming space that pays tribute to a material that its founder describes as noble. Ceramics are the main protagonists: mugs with original designs, symmetrical and asymmetrical dinnerware sets, vases with sculpted faces, trays with personalized phrases, sinks and lamps give life to the store area. Meanwhile, to the left of the store, in the workshop, the artisans mold each piece they make with their hands.
Elsa Lama von Buchwald She is the founder of the space, hence her name, which merges with the word workshop. She shares the address with her husband, Federico Cedeño, with whom some tasks are also shared. Cedeño is in charge of photos, production and administration. And Lama makes the designs and is dedicated to the technical part of the materials and the productions.
“We seek to show that here in Ecuador we have good material, we have talented hands that can make well-made pieces. We want to pay tribute to this material that is a tradition in Ecuador ”, expresses Lama, who since she was little has made ceramics part of her life.
“It is such a noble material, it is a material from the earth … it is something that connects us. The profession as such is a labor occupation, physical, but it is very rewarding, it is very meditative, it is very relaxing, it has many faculties that are transmitted in all the pieces. I want to show that this material can help us in many ways ”, adds the sculptor.
What is handmade is 100%, from the molds that are made by herself, to the formulation of the enamels and the elaboration of the pieces.
Prices vary depending on the product and its finish. There are cups from $ 8 to $ 20; the pots can be from $ 14, $ 22 to $ 200. They also make tiles to order, and the products can also be personalized, with a respective guide and suggestion given by the artisan and her husband.
Lama indicates that the workshop opened its doors in 2019, after being in need of making a decision about his professional future, because after living in New York for nine years and with a denied visa, he returned to Ecuador to embark on a new path. “I took all my savings and brought all my equipment to work”, says the artisan.
He is pleased that there are more places that work with ceramics at the moment. “I feel that now there is an awakening of people who increasingly want to make ceramics and who are looking for materials,” he says.
Lama and Cedeño say that for this year they plan to equip a space inside the house to give workshops, and in this way create a community where people learn, produce and spread this art. “I want it to be a space where you can create a taste for this material, and do practices (…) The idea is to have a space where it is enriched, not only in techniques and knowledge, but in the practices of others persons”says Lama, who warns that future artisans must be ready to get dirty.
Elsaller is located in Bálsamos 220-A, in Urdesa. Here their owners, artisans, and two friendly pets (Nema and Rosita) await them to make visitors fall in love with each piece made by Ecuadorian hands. The hours of operation are Monday through Friday, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. And Saturdays from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. They can visit their Instagram profile @elsaller.
About its founder
Elsa Lama von Buchwald was born in Guayaquil in 1989. Both her academic training and much of her professional performance as an artist, teacher and cultural manager were developed in New York. She has a BA in Fine Arts and Liberal Arts from Parsons The New School and an MA in Fine Arts from Columbia University. She taught ceramics and sculpture classes and ran the ceramics workshop at Columbia University and was part of the faculty at the Marquis Studio, where she taught art at different colleges in New York City. He worked as a production and administration manager at Atelier Memore and Stillclay, was an assistant to artists such as John Mosler and Jean Shin. (I)
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