About Us
Chisakuï is a place for exhibiting and promoting artisanal design from Latin America. The Chisakuï team is made up of fashion designers, artists, and art curators from the city of Bogotá, Colombia.
After years of experience in the sector and cultural research in Colombia and Italy, the Chisakuï project was born as a meeting place for dialogue and the promotion of traditional and contemporary productions from Abya-Yala.
Where? America was not always America
It is estimated that today there are around 807 native peoples —distributed in over 10,000 communities— throughout the American continent, which means more than 807 words to name the territory!
Abya-Yala is just one of these terms. In the Kuna language —of the indigenous people inhabiting between Colombia and Panama— Abya-Yala could be translated as "Land in full maturity", "Living Land", or "Land that blossoms", concepts that reflect an integral vision of the territory, as a place of perennial change and growth.
Our goal is to build bridges connecting exquisite creations with a conscious and curious audience
WHY?
Every handcrafted object retains fragments of the history and life of its creator. It embodies the inherited knowledge necessary for its creation, the imagination of the artisan/designer, and the stories of the region: elements integrated with techniques and materials that give life to precious objects of excellent quality, ready to be used in your daily life.
Conceiving our objects as an integral part of being, capable of ethically influencing one's own life and that of others, can lead us to grasp the uniqueness of things.
SMALL
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
In the Muysca language, cubun, Chisakui means both ARTISAN AND ARTIST. The distinction between Fine Arts and Applied Arts, common in the West, is actually very recent. Before the 18th-century Enlightenment, these disciplines were called upon, and the signatures that allow any abstract parallel were not determining.
Chisakui allows us to reflect on this idea, where crafts are fundamental for expressing their labor, their know-how, for the creation of objects that tell and transmit history, values, and traditions.
SMALL
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
In the Muysca language, cubun, Chisakui means both ARTISAN AND ARTIST. The distinction between Fine Arts and Applied Arts, common in the West, is actually very recent. Before the 18th-century Enlightenment, these disciplines were called upon, and the signatures that allow any abstract parallel were not determining.
Chisakui allows us to reflect on this idea, where crafts are fundamental for expressing their labor, their know-how, for the creation of objects that tell and transmit history, values, and traditions.
Muysccubun is the language of the Muisca people, the ancestral inhabitants of the Cundiboyacense plateau, where the city of Bogotá is located today. After centuries of oppression, the Muisca language has been close to extinction, even declared a "dead language": an erroneous assumption, since the Muisca resist, live, and still speak their own language. Traditional craftsmanship produces neither works of art nor ordinary objects. A third category is created that lies between these boundaries, offering pieces of high cultural value designed for everyday use, giving us beauty.
Muysccubun is the language of the Muisca people, the ancestral inhabitants of the Cundiboyacense plateau, where the city of Bogotá is located today. After centuries of oppression, the Muisca language has been close to extinction, even declared a "dead language": an erroneous assumption, since the Muisca resist, live, and still speak their own language. Traditional craftsmanship produces neither works of art nor ordinary objects. A third category is created that lies between these boundaries, offering pieces of high cultural value designed for everyday use, giving us beauty.
At Chisakuï, we are convinced that conscious production and consumption not only involves "handmade" items, but also a more complex process that includes several phases:
► BODYMADE
since it is created using one's teeth, eyes, feet... and the whole body.
► MINDMADE
since knowledge is stored in individual and collective memories.
► HEARTMADE
because these objects are imbued with the feelings of those who have woven, shaped, designed, and conceived them.
All the objects around us have been touched by human intervention, as there are no machines yet that create autonomously. But under what social and environmental conditions were our products created? Often this information seems distant or mysterious, given that mass industry has created an abysmal distance between producers and consumers.
At Chisakui, we appreciate the ethical use of machinery and tools, be they looms, sewing machines, irons, 3D printers, thimbles, presses… and any other technology that reflects the cultural and social development of a community.