blog!

The best thing about this master I’m doing is that every week you discover a new vocation. I didn’t have a special interest in carpets, and I know, tapestry sounds boring right? Well it’s fascinating if you get to know it like this.

The Royal Factory of Tapestry in Madrid (please excuse my very free translation) organises short guided visits of about 40 minutes. There’s just about a dozen of people working but it is really something incredible to watch them hand weave those huge tapestries with the same techniques that were used three centuries ago, for the sake of keeping them alive and because no machine can give the same exquisite result as they can, which is quite comforting in a way, don’t you think?

The place is wide and full of light and of skeins in hundreds of colours and tones. If taking pics was allowed, everyone would make the same photo, such was the eye-catchyness (I think I made up a word).

Across the patio which is like a park there is a school where a few pupils spend maaany months practising. That’s what it takes to be able to deal with that swarm of threads you see in the photo and create a very complex drawing; besides, they are on the back side, and have to use a mirror to see how their work is coming along. Crazy… and a real privilege that this is preserved so that we get to know it.

I have to admit I’m a great fan of Ikea. I confess… when I was studying Fine Arts in Seville and they opened a shop, we would go there just to take a peek. We had no appartments to decorate, so we’d come back with some scissors or stuff like that… and our bellies full of pancakes! So last friday I couldn’t miss their talk on their product’s design proccess.

So there we were at Matadero art & design center. You might wonder what the decoration was like? Well, obviously we were inside some page of ikea’s catalog, section: talks-workshops, (which should be right after offices and working spaces). We were surrounded by nice candles, nice lamps and a lot of books about Ikea, those thick-and-full-of-pictures styled ones.

We had the exhibition manager and head of strategy of IKEA Spain; the designer of Lillangen, you know that washstand that everyone likes, that my sister and probably your cousin both own, and guess what, she’s spanish, ha! (Inma Bermúdez); two danish designers who had made a lot of great stuff, and a textile designer whose work I admire and whose job I’d kill for. All of them tall, charming and willing to answer our questions even if they were: “Why do you name the products like that”. My friend Miren and I were this close to ask the textile designer the fabric she was showing to have a look at it with the magnifying glasses we always carry on now. Half super professional half moron, I know.

There’s another one next tuesday, Decoration inside IKEA: job opportunities, so if you’re interested don’t miss it… you don’t have to be a fan fatal like me to enjoy it!