DABGAR CANDLEHOLDERS AND TABLETS
2025
The Dabgar project is an exploration of a centuries-old and little-known craft, perpetuated in the province of Punjab in Pakistan. In the continuity of parchment, this craft transforms animal skin scraps into a continuous, resistant and translucent material. Using collagen from the skin as the sole binding agent, this craft is unique and ancestral, and is now in danger of disappearing. The Dabgar project aims to open up the formal language of this technique, which until now has been reserved for the creation of painted objects. It explores new uses, new scales and new sensory qualities of the material. It also opens up new perspectives for this craft, working to promote it, questioning production systems and striving for recognition for the artisans. Navigating between objects and sculptures, between emanation and silence, between gesture and living matter, the collection reveals the elemental beauty of the material.
The leather candleholders play on the analogy between parcment and wax. Both solemn and archaic, bearing the marks of the craftsmen’s hands, each candle holder is hand-sculpted from clay.
The writing tablets are the result of a collaboration with Pakistani artist Zahid Mayo. Created jointly in the Dabgar workshops in Multan, they pay tribute to Sufism, of which the city is one of the important cradles. The transcribed texts reveal remarkable similarities between the 12th-century poetry of Ibn Arabi and René Char’s Hypnos pages, written in 1943-44. Although they are not from the same geographical area or the same period, these writings echo each other in a striking way and call for a spirituality imbued with mysticism and courage. The plates, engraved in arabic and french, are also at the crossroads of parchment and stone, two secular and universal writing supports.
Photo Credits Stéphane Ruchaud.
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