Archivi tag: freedom

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PERCHE’ NO Jewels

Galleria

 “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.

 

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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.

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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.

FB

Instagram

 

 

Donatella

Highlights

Nico’s version

Galleria
Nico and I we know each other since 5 years already, and I still remember the first time we were talking on my terrace, drinking a glass of wine, the moment I thought that I needed to tell his story. He is the typical artist, the way we all imagine a creative mind: brilliant, fleeting, changing and enthusiastic about everything and every proposals!
Since then he climbed the ladder, but always being humble, passionate and curious.

 

 

Who is Nico?!

 

I grow up in Tuscany on a hill in the middle of nowhere. It was, and still is an oasis of freedom and inspiration. Surrounded by nature, as a child I helped often my dad to do agricultural activities such cutting grass or doing fire wood. This was my first contact with machines like the chainsaw. As I grew older, I started using it for carving sculptures. A lot of space, no neighbors, no noise restrictions, it was the perfect playground for me to learn as autodidact wood sculpture. When I was 17 years old I did my first sculpture, without model, protection and without a plan what a possible outcome could be.

This was the starting point of my career as sculptor.

NMH030HNM_sculptures__0066 MU_0043 MU_0040 progetto la quinta stagione 2.0 Prof. Kuno Prey

When did you start to sculpt?

 

When I was a child I always wanted to become a midwife. I do not know how this idea went into my mind, but it was so strong that I started to look for an internship in that field as I was 16 years old. The idea of giving birth to something always inspired me. At the time (nowadays I do not know how it is) this type of profession was reserved for women. Looking back at this time I think that I always had in me the unconscious desire to create something or at least to assist to giving birth to something. In the context of making sculptures I realized that it was more important to me to create something, instead of only assisting to give birth.

I decided to move to London in 2016, as I got a place at the Royal College of Arts. I always wanted to study product design.

 

HNM_sculptures__0078 2What’s so special in your works?

I am not so sure. I think that they are quite unique as I never do research before starting a new project. I do not know if something like that exists already; I also do not know where my work is going to take me.

In other words I often start with a material or a process without knowing what the outcome come will be.

 

 

 

 

 

scaffali025Where does your passion come from?

I think the most important thing about my work is that I enjoy doing what I am doing. I do not think that much about it… I just start somewhere, without knowing exactly where I am going to end. This is the reason why the first and last step in producing my sculptures is the making aspect. I do not sketch that much and I prefer not to model what am doing.

 

 

 

 

 

Your mantra? 

Start doing instead of thinking!

When you start a project, do it with love and follow your passion and choose your project topic in base of what you enjoy doing.

 

Soon the new website!

Instagram

 

 

Travels

CHRISTOPH REHAGE

Video

      “My name is Christoph Rehage, and I like to take walks sometimes.”

 

I was born a fat kid to a Hungarian mom and a German dad in Hannover on November 9th in 1981.

During my childhood, I spent my time mostly consuming adventure stories and setting things on fire. Later on, I ended up in Wichita, Kansas, for a year, then in Paris as a laborer, and eventually in Beijing, this time as a student of Chinese studies.

At some point in between, I spontaneously decided to walk home from Paris. Walking was both terrible and awesome at the same time, and I realized that this was something that I liked very much. More than reading. More than swimming. More than taking pictures, and probably even more than watching TV.

It was better than fire.

On the morning of my 26th birthday, on November 9th 2007, I started walking home from Beijing to Germany. I walked and I walked, growing a beard that got later called mighty by some and patchy by others, and then, after a year on the road, close to the border of Kazakhstan, I stopped walking.
I returned home to our village, made a video about the walk called “The Longest Way”, and posted it online. Little did I know that it would turn out to become a minor internet sensation.

And then it happened: I found something that I liked and feared more than walking – writing. I struggled with the pen and the paper for many a sleepless night, and eventually I came out of battle with two books: a travelogue (“The Longest Way”/ Malik: German) and a coffee table book (“China zu Fuß”/ National Geographic: German) about the walk.

The books did well enough for me to keep doing this. I am now working as a columnist for a Chinese newspaper, and my next book (“Chinese Characteristics”/ Contemporary China Publishing House: Chinese, a collection of the articles that I am writing there, has just hit the market in China last summer).

  • Walking, okay, I get the idea. But I’m still a bit confused: from where to where did you actually walk? I started walking in Beijing on November 9th 2007, and I stopped in Ürümqi in northwestern China almost one year later, on October 25th 2008. Two years after that, in the summer 0f 2010, I walked a few hundred miles more, from Ürümqi to Usu. And in 2012, I went from Usu to Khorgas, the border checkpoint between China and Kazakhstan.
  • How did you get the idea for the walk? I had walked from Paris to my home in Germany before – a walk of about 800 km that took less than a month. There were no metaphysical questions, no big worries, just pragmatic problems to solve: where to sleep, what to eat. It felt good, and it felt meaningful.
  • Can you describe the process you undergo to prepare for a walking trip? I prepared for a year. Basically, it’s all about getting as smart as possible. I talked to German embassies all over the world, stumbled through map archives in several libraries, and read books, books and more books. Then I got equipped. Then I got vaccinated. Then I walked.
  • What state of mind were you in when you were walking? It was just the way it would be on any normal day. Sometimes you think about stuff. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you worry about passports, dangers, pains, relatives and loved ones, and at other times your steps are light and you sing songs in the desert. Sometimes it’s boring. And sometimes you feel at peace.
  • How many hours did you walk each day? I would usually feel comfortable walking 20 to 30 km in one day. That means I would have to be constantly moving for about 4 to 6 hours. Put in some breaks for picture taking, eating, resting, peeing, talking to people, wondering about the way, and I am on the road all day – but I didn’t walk every day.
  • Why did you stop walking? I wanted to gain back my life. I had to regain control over myself, eliminate the inner boss that was telling me to keep walking. A lot of people look at the video thinking “I want to be free like that guy!” – but they don’t realize that I was driven by something, and maybe I was losing control over it.
  • What is this something you are talking about? I think this something was partly my ambition and partly my principle. It seemed more and more like I was living to fulfill my ambition, and I was directed by principles that I had no way of changing. I didnt feel very free.
  • What does it mean you were losing ( or better you had to regain) control of your life because of this experience?
    I had to emancipate myself from my ambition and from all principles. To become a free man again.
  • Who is Teacher Xie? Why did you dedicate the video to him? 谢建光 (Xie Jianguang) is a brave man who has been walking all over China since 1982. I ran into him somewhere in the desert, and we have been friends ever since. He has taught me some valuable lessons.
  • What lessons did you need to learn when you met him? I didnt know it back then, but Teacher Xie taught me about walking as a physical excercise, which was important for me. However, more importantly he taught me to think about your priorities in life. What is the most important thing? What is number 2? Number 3? You must always know what you want. Otherwise you will be confused.
  • Why is the video also dedicated to love? I think it is important to know what we value most in life.
  • How is the video dedicated to love? How? Well, I think any journey is just a way of spending time. You dont have to go far to live an adventure. But it is important to remember what you value in life. Love could be one of these things.
  • What did you use to think of China before the journey, and what do you think now? Did something change? Well, I had been living in Beijing for two years when I started my walk. So the walk really didn’t change much of my perspective on China. Except for the fact that I got to meet so many fantastic people out in the countryside, out on dusty roads, and in the mountains of China. They are the best!
  • Do you have any tips for people who are on their own search for peace? I am not very good at this. There are brief moments when I am feeling at ease, but they usually don’t last very long, and then the wolf starts howling again. However, I think age and experience probably helps with this. You have to know your priorities.
  • So, in which way Chris today is different from Chris right after the longest way? I am hopefully better at controlling myself. I am hopefully more able to take on some responsibility. But some things never change. You stay the same idiot. Just slightly altered. 
  • What major advice do you have for someone who wants to do pursue his or her own dream? Sounds tacky, but here it is: Take the first step!
  • Would you, please, introduce your two blogs: bookslap.com and SlowerPulse.com? On the book blog, I read travel books and introduce them for you. I do this because I enjoy reading travel books, and I think it is not easy to find the books that are really worth reading. So I try to help a bit. On the pulse blog, I talk about vodka brands that I have tried. It is nothing special, just a hobby of mine, because I picked up drinking only when I was 27. So it is all new and exciting!

Here’s a Chinese news item about Christoph’s satirical video show 德国自干五有话语权, he makes fun of modern-day newspeak and blackwhite in the Orwellian sense. As he said, there are English subtitles on this news item, but they look like someone used Google Translate, so watch it just for fun!

 

Want to know more? You are totally right!

Christoph Rehage Facebook Page