m.a.g.

THE JOURNEY: INSPIRATION, WORKSHOPS AND BACKSTAGE

On most occasions, what we receive from fashion, contemporary art, cinema, or photography is the final result of laborious work that begins with inspiration, from which the artist begins, a splendid trip to a place that is always unknown, because on trips, even if everything has been planned in advance, every day there are surprises and changes.

That journey is often the most interesting part of the creation, a journey in which not only the artist participates – whether it is a fashion designer, a painter or a filmmaker – but other essential people in the creative process, who contribute in a very important and necessary way, turning on the stoves of the kitchens of creativity, not only a work that contributes to the director’s ideas, but that also contributes their own and turns the process into a magical cocktail, full of synergies, aiming at a final result that is always exciting and logically uncertain.

And we ask ourselves, what is most important? For us, without a doubt, the journey, the creative process.

What us spectators receive is the creation that has already been cooked, ready, decorated, packaged, perfect. And we, who are very curious, want to see the final result with a great depth of field, not losing the details of what is behind it; and to feed our curiosity more, we want to know about the unknown, what is behind the curtains, what happened during the process, the laughter and the tears, the images of the bright days and the cloudy ones, the colour black and the white, the pink and the blue.

For this reason, we who follow the trends, the contemporary, and extract what tells us something from what is happening, we go to the moment of inspiration, and to the process, to those kitchens of the artists and talents, to the backstage, visiting the places of creation of the protagonists: their studios, filming, workshops and the moment before the presentation, that backstage full of nerves moments before the stage, in which all the ingredients are already present: food, spices, salt, water, desire, and illusion, without being mixed yet. It is those moments which fill us with emotion. And the end result matters, but somewhat less.

We honour not only the work of the designer, photographer, filmmaker or plastic artist, but also stylists, make-up artists, hairdressers, assistants, gaffers, pagers, assemblers, models and actresses… to all those who make the creative process possible, because they all do a job that deserves to be taken into account, because they are the ones who design the energies and synergies, the ones who are in the design process, on the journey, and are, undoubtedly, part of the end result.

Words: Jo García Garrido

Photography: Javier Moran