Photo of Neha lad Studio (Edited)

Chado. “Mai-sho.”

Photo of Chado at SeaWood Hotel, Japan Miyako Island 2023.01.01

Talking about the artistry in the process of making art itself brings us to Chado.

A Hiroshima-born self taught calligraphy artist who, inspired by street poetry, affected by the early loss of her mother, and moved by a musician she collaborated with in 2015, created “Maisho” a synthesizing of calligraphy art and dance which would shape the basis of her future performances.

From Rock to traditional Japanese or African music the brushstrokes are loud, windingly elaborate, and performed with such a visible concentrated effort that from afar it almost seems like a trance.

Having since performed across the globe, she took her art across south-east Asia, Arabia, collaborated in projects with the ministry of culture in Mali, and performed across a European tour which had her appear at 2019’s Japan expo in Paris.

La Mostra - Documentaries

Of course elaborate performances aren’t the only feature, over the course of the event’s three days La Mostra will be screening a series of five documentary films centered on different artists and their life’s work.

Here’s an experiment you can perform in your own environment:

Many of you may have heard from us or a recent news story about the complete gutting of the local textiles made with vicuña by a series of luxury brands buying up all of the stock from local production.

Now, I want you to go up to your friends and family who are not read up on this stuff, and ask three of them if they know what vicuña is or where it comes from. You will genuinely have me shocked if the result is higher than 0 for 3.

People do not know about these things. And ‘these things’ are to the world of textiles what celebrity bands are to music. So, let’s talk about the importance of record keeping:

‘Studio visits: Lin Wang’ by Norwegian crafts and Revers Produksjon

To many cultures and at many different times, textiles have been a language. Whether it was before inventing their own written word or entirely in place of it, the weaves and materials they used were the tools and symbols that told their stories. Same as paintings, potteries and murals did for societies all across the Mediterranean.

Around three to four hundred years ago, in the twilight years of European feudalism and the onset of the earliest forms of modern industry and property relations, came the beginning of a global Imperialist expansion that would upturn the world.

The standardization of language, culture, symbology that already trampled upon smaller European nations like Ukraine under the boot of the Russian empire, or the Sami under the boot of the Swedish, was expanded to the rest of the world.

Thousands of artifacts and cultures, methods of communication and art were built over, dynamited, and replaced, because their conquerors did not have the time — nor the economic interest — to allow them to adapt into the industrial world.

A century has passed since this happened, and time has sanded the remnants of those stories away.

As ‘enlightened’ as society claimed to be at the time, despite it being the era of the great universities of the 19th century. Countless stories and languages were gleefully forgotten due to the prejudices and beliefs of what exactly made up ‘scientific progress’.

“Master Artcraft Perfumer" (Cataluña, 2019) de Andrea Rigalós

It is easy, even comfortable, to think that in the age of the internet, where access to information has never been broader, things would never be forgotten like that again.

But the Internet, like every asset in our modern society, is chartered and divided up by companies and the wealthy. Action in a market economy does not come to things that do not profit and ultimately, the record of these stories is not seen as something that sells.

So, morbid as it is. Until these stories start selling streaming platform subscriptions, the task of recording them falls on us.

La Mostra’s project keeps these pockets of history alive, playing them for the general public and promoting them to people who’d otherwise never seen them at all.

You can say that it really isn’t that deep. And, that’s entirely fair. At the end of the day we make movies because movies are nice. But the Berber knot almost became history, and now it’s again being used to weave carpets. Whether or not we tell these stories fundamentally affects the modern world, whether we’d like it or not.

And, if any of that sounded interesting to you, maybe walk by the Es Baluard Sacred ateliers! Another project deeply connected to remembrance and the record of present history will also be present there.

No I’m not elaborating, come see it for yourself.