Attitude 120: Curiosity

It takes courage to change, to reinvent what already exists, boldness to step beyond the threshold of risk, and audacity is required to create and do things differently.
Perhaps by way of nostalgia, since this is the last edition of the year marking Attitude’s 20th anniversary, we finish off with one of the best themes that defines us — Curiosity.

‘An indiscreet desire to know’ is one of the many possible definitions. We enjoy challenging conventional forms, and for 120 editions we’ve outdone ourselves, through a variety of dramatic spatial gestures that emphasise our convictions and weave our identity.

I suggest a brief reflection, inspired by the words of the poet Jarod K. Anderson, in his most recent book Something in The Woods Loves You: “there are two paths to magic: imagination and attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built from falsehoods, glittering dust on the surface of the water. To pay attention is to intentionally notice, to participate in the creation of meaning to give new weight to our world. Magic is not a rejection of what is real. It’s a synthesis of the same, the nectar of facts becomes the honey of meaning.”

In some ways, in this issue we celebrate the new meaning of craftsmanship, of the work of art in its pure form, the kind that comes from the soul and the hands, as we experience a revival of the Arts & Crafts movement all over the world — perhaps as a need to counteract the fleetingness of the digital age and the extolling of life’s vulgarities. In other words, heritage is rescued which, through the eloquence with which communicates human emotions, is a love letter to know-how.

We witnessed this global trend at close quarters at Homo Faber 2024 under the theme ‘The Journey of Life’, which took place in Venice last September, and which we highlight in this issue in our Global Report, Meet and Portfolio sections. We present a selection of artists who have piqued our interest and aroused our curiosity, creative minds who appeal to the timelessness of art and ancestry at its finest, in a unique staging as an ode to craftsmanship in the form of experimental poetry. Even if contemporary intervention bypasses crafts, here we are talking about traditional techniques explored in the most varied of ways, through an immersive dialogue that inspires and motivates us to seek and crave more. Now do you feel curious?