Li’s Forecast #1

The Future is Handmade

Lidewij Edelkoort

Column

May 2025

Lidewij Edelkoort

is one of the world’s most beloved and influential forecasters. Each month, she writes a column for See All This titled The Future is Handmade, where she shares her views on the future and spotlights a unique handmade object. For Edelkoort, these objects are more than just beautiful — they represent a quiet form of resistance against an increasingly artificial future.

Column

May 2025

Almost awkward, the object emerges from its silk paper wrapping when my heart skips a beat. In my hands I hold the most beautiful plate I have ever observed, a gift from a cherished being that seems to know me to my core. Irregular, the ceramic is hovering in my palms, a warm shape, a perfect weight, and a peculiar shade I can’t quite name. Somewhere between grey, rose and celadon, slivers of each ripple through the glaze, that is spectacularly otherworldly. It resembles an old dutch object, which I imagine resting beside ancient tin spoons serving hearty food.

As an amateur chef myself, plating has become an important aspect of my cooking and this peculiar plate invites to house a rural pasta or an unusual sandwich with salted butter and figs –to prepare a tartine with fruit will soon become a trend.

At times an object has an invisible value, and it is difficult to understand where this value resides and comes from. It feels as if the plate detaches itself from the table in a quest to request attention. The secret is in the respect for the ingredients and the intensity of the maker, holding on to an animistic principle where the products conspire to create osmosis between earth and ashes, in order to conceive this simple yet unique object with a soul.

The revival of arts and crafts preserves us from other forlorn products born from the uncontrollable desire for growth, a strong sign of evolution towards a more aesthetic existence with a more hopeful and connected way of life. Choosing the right product suddenly becomes a form of resistance and this is why cultivated collectors are turning to the handmade, stimulating a growing movement and of course affirming the power of humans over machines – an urgent combat we are collectively facing on the eve of the takeover by artificial intelligence.

‘Choosing the right product suddenly becomes a form of resistance and this is why cultivated collectors are turning to the handmade’

The work of Marjoke de Heer is generated by these principles as her products are born from local earth.

The making of a bowl or a plate is for her almost like cooking food or baking bread, with precisely well-chosen ingredients, her recycled clay and collected wood ash, the last residue from a special tree that will give colour tot the design. Her sensational glazes are the result of studies in ashes of various trees, that each result in other hues after firing the ceramics. Each clay its own density, each other tree its own veil of colour. Closer to home we cannot get.

An object from her own hand and from an exceptional calibre is waiting to be adopted in your life. All specimens are adorable, you cannot go wrong.

— Lidewij Edelkoort

Fig 1. Amsterdam Plates by Marjoke de Heer

Marjoke de Heer is launching a limited number of plates in the shop especially for readers of See All This. In unpredictable tonalities and various irregularities and one size fits all. Edelkoort: ‘All specimens are adorable, you cannot go wrong.’

Click here to view the plates in our shop.

Beginning next month, however, Li’s Forecast will be exclusively available to Friends (subscribers) of See All This. Don’t want to miss out? Become a Friend today!