“If you can dream it you can do it.” W. Disney
Beginning.
Silvia Tagliasacchi: I am the third child of a Bolognese family. Like all the youngest of a family, I perhaps had the role too of breaking family patterns. Or at least to strongly question them! This has made my first 30 years of life tiring and beautiful together.
The idea of creating jewelry dates back to 15 years ago. But I never would have imagined to take it seriously and work on it to create jewelry lines, with an accurate style and a studied concept.
I had a wonderful trip to Thailand and by chance… Can you believe it… I found a flyer advertising about a goldsmith course for tourists. It all took place at a teacher’s home, every afternoon for a week.
It was a beautiful experience.
I immediately fell in love with all those unusual work tools and the art of governing fire so precisely that I could melt and weld metals. In short, it was so engaging that the return backpack contained at least 10 kg of equipment, including a goldsmith’s column drill!
Years later I created my brand with a very unusual name. A name that comes exactly from the question “Why not? (PERCHE’ NO)” I question myself at a time in life that required a job and existential change. I thought that the question represented exactly what I wanted to become: “PERCHE’ NO (Why not)… Can’t it be done? Why can’t I call into question the choices of my first 40 years of life? Why can’t I bet on myself? Why can’t I think of working while having fun or… In a almost subversive way… Having fun working? Feeling that I didn’t have a real answer to this question, that there was no reason why I couldn’t really change my life, this opened up truly unexpected horizons.
What’s so special in your work?
I make modular and reversible jewels.
I play with shapes and colors in order to have a single piece that can be transformed, to give more wearability. I make them by hand using metals and goldsmith’s techniques, along with oriental papers -worked and aged- to make them part of the metal. But I don’t think that the peculiarity of my works lies in the technique. Rather, it is the message they carry: you can change. I am convinced that our form (of human beings) has infinite mutation possibilities. We are born with the gift of transformation and we can reach this freedom. Even that of becoming asymmetric. Beauty is in the creativity of opening ourselves to transformation. Seeing that things can take other shapes or colors. And maybe at first glance you hadn’t even noticed. Here it is. To adorn yourself with something that reminds us of this amazing ability… All-female… It seemed beautiful to me.
Where does your passion come from?
I have always loved working with my hands, to create using my imagination. Houses, shelters, tools… anything. Then I fell in love with some materials and explored them with the adolescence inexperience and the tenacity of the self- taught. By force or luck I have always been an experimenter. My training and my studies, for the most disparate reasons, have always been the most distant from the artistic/artisan field. By force of things, I am mainly self-taught and thanks to continuous experimentation I could always learn more: hours and hours of creative errors and instructive frustrations.
I think working with my hands is a need, as well as a passion.
It relaxes me, opens my mind to a constant changing perspectives job. Sometimes tiring, sometimes enthusiastically.
Difficulties.
The biggest difficulty was certainly changing my career path and starting to do what I wanted: using my imagination and my hands. It was a choice I made when I already had a family and children and when common sense said that I had to move towards to a safe job and salary. This decision required a great deal of courage and confidence in my abilities and in life. After taking this leap into the dark, everything developed with great fluidity. Which does not mean without problems and difficulties, but always accompanied by solutions and possibilities.
Your goals.
For the moment, the biggest goal is to live off my work. It is about waking up every morning without the effort of having to go to work. It is the feeling to be a free and lucky woman.
Suggestions to someone who wants to start a business!
Well… Go headlong, choose good masters and allies, and never stop being curious.
Future.
Traveling, traveling traveling. A training trip to learn craft and artistic techniques, scattered around the globe. An unhurried journey, to fill my eyes with beauty… Then I find myself fantasizing about international fairs and building an online sales network.
