11 interviews and many photographs exploring traditional Japanese dyeing techniques.
“For Craft Portrait: Dorozome, we travelled to Amami Oshima, an island situated in the South of Japan. There, we spent three weeks with the artisans of Kanai Kougei, learning and exploring dorozome (mud-dyeing). This immersive field trip allowed us to dive into the artisans’ everyday life, helping us understand their relationship to their craft and get acquainted with the island’s culture.
Dorozome is a mud-dyeing technique during whose process white yarns are repeatedly dyed - the technique requires more than 85 dyeing steps - until they reach a deep black colour.
The rhythm of the dyeing process shaped our entire time in Amami. It led us to discover a new cycle of creation. The craft showed us its transformative potential, both of the products that we conceived and of our relationship to what we had created. That’s what we want to emphasize with Craft Portrait. How to see beyond the final product of such a rich and complex process? …
By involving the artisans and creating space for their testimonies, stories and opinions on their craft, we lead a dialogue surrounding craftsmanship that values the speech of the people performing it every day
In a largely globalized and standardized world, material creation often takes the shape of quickly mass-produced goods. We believe in the counter-cultural, alternative, almost rebel potential of craftmanship to challenge the status quo.”
Text in Japanese and English, soft cover, 24 x 17 cm, 104 pages, ed/800, n.p. 2020
ISBN 978-90-9034120-0
