What is artistic heritage in arts and crafts? Reflections on the transmission of a unique savoir-faire

Lineage

Artistic lineage and inheritance is a delicate and sensitive subject. 
In art as in life, it’s a story of encounters, of absences, but also of discoveries and reunions (at times with oneself) that pulse and sometimes propel us from one world to the next.

For a long time, I have had the desire to name and speak of those I look to with gratitude, emotion and passion.

My greatest fear in this almost genealogical endeavour is sentimentality, which doesn’t depend on the energy of life but on its memory.

Simply to describe what has been the passion, and often entire life’s work, of some creators doesn’t do justice to the generosity and freedom they lived.

What a truly free creator is at a given moment in their life cannot be described, but rather is met, touched, and even felt through human interaction. The almost primal freedom to do for others cannot be put into words.

The beauty of the workshop is the freedom of offering yourself to people who are simply passing by. We will sometimes keep these precious moments hidden within ourselves, unknowingly using them to guide us through the dark paths life reserves for us.

So there is Torun, the great Swedish lady whose name and beauty we hear of, who came to create, shape and imprint her vision of movement on metal. An outstanding creator, she has always seemed to me like a sort of timeless myth, half-woman, half-goddess whose name alone lights up the eyes of many in my village.

There are those without whom nothing would be possible. Those without whom the movement of the tool would still be a mystery, a madness. Those men who always leave the door of their workshop open and their tools at your disposal.
Those who, without any misstep, know how to show the way that is still unknown. Claude and Thierry Pelletier were and still are my expert and attentive guides, who, in offering me their knowledge, offered me a future.

The foundations, the true symbols of freedom and of a life to be devoured, were Arlette Baron (a jeweller from Biot) and Micha Steiger (a jeweller and performer from Berlin), proving that every path is the right one if it is taken with passion and truth. Saying that nothing is better than trying, and then, perhaps, doubting.

Finally, the paternal imprint, the one that at times impresses too much, like the shadow of a tree too big to even dare to seek shelter under, even if as a child, I always felt the freedom to be myself in his workshop.
The smell of the workshop was that of time spent alone. The smell of a story that doesn’t need telling because you are living it.
There wasn’t enough time for me to travel the world, to live in voluntary exile and to experience life as an individual before coming back to learn by his side.
But from all these experiences I retain one thing: it is always by turning towards others that we come closer to ourselves.