OUR STORY & PHILOSOPHY
Antimaterie is a Belgian ceramics brand, founded in 2020 by Pieter Bostoen. Coming from a background as a scenographer and interior designer, he set out to answer one question: how does an ancient craft speak to the present?
Every piece begins there. We study the history of ceramics, its techniques, its rituals and its meanings, and translate them into objects with a recognisable design language: graphic, geometric and built on craftsmanship. Traditional methods sit alongside modern ones, and neither takes over.
Rare by design
Antimaterie is made slowly and released sparingly. Each piece is either unique or part of a small series, and new work only appears now and then. The ceramics have travelled across Europe to North America, the Middle East and Australia, and into collections such as Galila Barzilai’s P.O.C. in Brussels.
Cultural Ambassador of Roeselare, 2025–2027
Pieter was awarded the cultural ambassadorship of Roeselare, the city where he grew up. Roeselare is the first governmental body to financially support Hiding in plain sight, a project in which he places ceramic masks in public spaces.
Masks carry centuries of ritual and cultural meaning: they protect, conceal and reveal at once. The works will be present in the city in subtle, sometimes unexpected places, and invite passers-by to pause. What mask do I wear myself? What do I show to the world, and what do I keep hidden?
On Antimatter and Clay
Ceramics is, by most accounts, humanity’s oldest technology. Before metal, before the wheel, before writing, there was fired earth. Someone, tens of thousands of years ago, discovered that clay touched by fire stops being clay. It becomes something else entirely: harder, permanent, changed at a level you cannot undo. That single discovery still sits at the center of most things I make.
I named this studio Antimaterie for a reason that has little to do with clay at first glance. Antimatter is one of physics’ strangest ideas: a mirror version of ordinary matter that, on contact, doesn’t combine with it but annihilates it, releasing pure energy in the process. It is almost impossible to hold onto. It exists only briefly before meeting ordinary matter and disappearing.
Clay is the opposite of that. It is patient. It is slow. A piece I glaze today might still exist in three thousand years, the way Bronze Age pottery still exists today, largely unchanged, while the people who made it have left almost no other trace. If antimatter is the most fleeting thing we know of, fired ceramic might be one of the most enduring.
But the two aren’t as far apart as they seem. Both are about transformation past a point of no return. When clay is fired, something irreversible happens to its structure: it cannot be turned back into clay, no matter what you do to it. When matter and antimatter meet, they don’t just react; they convert entirely into something new. Both processes are one-way doors. I find that idea quietly compelling: that the oldest craft and the strangest physics are both, in their own way, studies in permanence created through irreversible change.
There’s also something in the naming itself. Physics has a habit of giving invisible, barely-there phenomena precise, almost poetic names, like quark, singularity, strange matter, dark energy. Words invented to describe things we can’t fully see or touch, but need to name anyway in order to think about them clearly. That’s not so different from what happens on a workbench. A form comes out of the kiln and it needs a name before it can be understood, before it can sit next to other pieces and make sense as part of something larger. Science has always been a good place for me to borrow language from, not because ceramics is scientific, but because both disciplines are trying to make the invisible speak.
There’s a reason this feels worth saying now. We’re at a moment where images and objects can be generated in seconds, endlessly, by systems that have never touched anything. Nothing about that process resists you. It has no friction, no failure, no clay that cracks in the kiln for reasons you don’t fully understand. Ceramics is the opposite of effortless. It is slow on purpose, and it fails often, and every piece carries the trace of a specific pair of hands on a specific day. That’s not nostalgia. It’s the actual difference. A piece that took two weeks and three attempts to survive firing holds a kind of evidence that nothing artificially generated can hold, because nothing was ever risked to make it.
Maybe that’s the real reason the oldest technology feels more necessary now than it did ten years ago, not despite everything new, but because of it. People aren’t just looking for objects. They’re looking for objects that passed through something real.
So the name stays somewhere between a joke and a genuine reference point: a technology as old as human hands, named after a phenomenon we’ve never managed to hold onto for more than an instant, made, unlike so much else now, entirely by hand.
