Our jewelry alumna Vivi Touloumidi has been chosen as Hanau's Stadtgoldschmiedin (City Goldsmith) 2025. With this award, the city of Hanau is honoring an artist who has been working intensively with the social dimension of jewelry for many years: as an expression of memory, resistance and transformation.

Touloumidi will work in Hanau for six weeks in the summer of 2025 and hold a workshop for pupils at the Drawing Academy. She will also present her artistic positions in a solo exhibition at the Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus in 2026.

Jewelry reflects society

In her work, Touloumidi deals with the social significance of design. In one of her brooches, she takes up the symbol of the black angle – a mark used by the Nazis to brand people in concentration camps as "asocial". "Someone designed these angles," she says, recognizing the "banality of evil" according to Hannah Arendt ("Banalität des Bösen").

Made from paper, plastic and aluminum, she artistically explores the history of this symbol. Her work reveals that jewelry is far more than just an ornament. It is a social tool and a carrier of social memory. In this way, Touloumidi introduces viewers to the responsibility of design.

From Athens via Pforzheim to Antwerp

Vivi Touloumidi was born in Athens, first trained as a goldsmith and then studied in Halifax, Stockholm and at Pforzheim University. She later completed a doctorate at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in Belgium. Today she lives and works between Berlin and Antwerp.

Touloumidi also sees her election as City Goldsmith as a return: she had already been offered a place at the summer school at the drawing academy in 2005, but was unable to attend at the time. Two decades later, she is now returning to this place as an established artist.