TO Milan, a creative workshop was the starting point of a journey to discover the designer’s design research Ilaria Bianchi. An opportunity to reflect on what is really useful in life and wonder if the magical element is really disappearing from (our) world
An invitation to a presentation, but not just any presentation, a workshop. “Tarot Journaling, a creative exercise to explore the power of arcana. We talk to each other through a joint Tarot reading, we draw, we listen to music, we drink a natural rosé,” he writes to me. Ilaria Bianchi.
A successful designer, with important collaborations with international galleries behind her, Ilaria is an alchemist artist, one of those women who create works between spirit and matter, aware of her own. dharma, or what in Buddhism is understood as the talent to offer to others, one’s mission. A woman Que Sabeto quote the Jungian writer and psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estéswho knows, that connects with her inner child.
It is in the Riviera area, in the center of Milan, that Ilaria welcomes us to talk to us about her new ceramic brand Abstinence. A collection of plates, glasses, cups, bowls and jugs filled with drawings, portraits and emotional panoramas. “Temperance as a tarot card, my card of the year according to the numerological reading suggested by Vicky Noble, anthropologist, feminist and specialist in matriarchal cultures.”
At a round table, to provoke the circular nature of the female, plates and objects from the collection are placed in it, each handmade in a pottery workshop in Grottaglie, Puglia, where Ilaria spent several months in 2020 in an artist residency. Each artefact has its own soul, its own message to send to the world: one plate reads the phrase ‘Really useful things’, another holds a naked female figure, another the wish ‘May you live as a spirit’.
What are the really useful things in life? The Sun, the Moon and the food that nourishes us, even if the society we live in makes us believe otherwise
“I’m an animist: things are never just things, and Temperance’s objects tell stories, embody symbolic and metaphorical values. The first human beings lived immersed in an “integrated” environment, with no real separation between myth and nature. Temperance offers small daily projects that reconnect us with the sensitive power of objects, in the hope of making our relationships with them more sustainable and long-lasting,” Ilaria explains.
His sister Silvia guides us in understanding the Temperance card. Both were fascinated by fortune from little girls and made gods Tarot is a tool for inner analysis and personal development. A way to understand each other better, to respect their limits and fears. The study of the map and its details is the starting point for a series of discussions about the inner world of the person. Time expands, we begin to navigate the subtle space of emotions.
We talk about how we deny ourselves, more and more often, listening to our deepest needs and desires. As background to everything, two questions:Is magic disappearing from the world?’ and above all: “What is magic?”. What emerges in the circle are different visions—some recognizing the magic in kind souls, others in the energy sometimes mysteriously created between people, others in the beauty inherent in things—but close because of the fragility with which they are expressed. It’s not often that we take the time to think about what magic is. At that time it appears today as the true, enormous privilege of our society.
For Ilaria, magic lies in intuition and the ability to listen to it
Abstinence it comes from there, from that intuition that connects soul and body in the creative act. A female instinct that over the centuries is systematically suppressed by the fear of its creative, reproductive power a witch hunt that never stopped. “Abstinence reappropriates the stereotypical iconography of witches, rebelling against an ethnocentric-Western vision that subjugates what the philosopher and anthropologist Ernesto De Martino called “people of nature” or those who live in rural environments following the rhythms of the earth, who abandons himself guiltlessly to wasting time, to idleness, to life. Even standing still means taking a stand.”
So it happens Abstinence it becomes a much bigger project, huge in terms of the issues it raises, an opportunity to wake up, to understand that beyond the bubble of our lives there is a world in which going a day without a smartphone is not a revolutionary act, where is Allowed to take time to converse with your soul, reconnect with nature and plant the seeds of a new awareness. To regain the true sense of magic. This is the great power of design, it makes us think. Because objects, to those who really know how to see, are never just objects.