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Tessera Mundi

The Pact

Five lines,
one single work

The Pact of Keeping is not a contract and obliges you to nothing: it is the way this thing stands up.

Pact of Keeping

The code of whoever receives a tessera

  1. Keep it with care: place it where the light can bring it to life.
  2. Give it away, if your heart asks you to: a tessera that changes hands widens the work.
  3. Tell its story: send the Atlas a photograph and a few lines; your city or village will join the map.
  4. Accept its fate: whatever happens to it is part of the work.
  5. Remember that no other one exists like it.

The contribution

What holds
all of this up

The contribution is 85 CHF. Inside it are the materials — glass, enamel, gold leaf, silver, stones picked up along the road, cement support — the case, the seal, the postage — anywhere in the world — and the time of the person who makes it, one tessera at a time.

What is left goes back into the studio: it becomes the glass and the stone of the tesserae still to come. So whoever takes one into their keeping does not only bring home a work — they hold the workshop open for the next one, which will find another home in a city they may never see. On the Atlas you can watch all of this grow.

See the Shop Open the Atlas