The beginning

The Atelier Extraordinaire was born out of the need to name more than just a working space, or a physical place where different disciplines have a place, it was born out of the need to name a way of life.

I am not the first person who, while developing a creative work, so many times finds it difficult to distinguish the limit (real, spatial or conceptual) between work and personal and despite the fact that many people think that, in the long run, it is not sustainable for work spaces and times to merge or be too confused with personal ones, in recent years I have been able to see that I do not conceive of my life in any other way and that separating these spaces produces more discomfort than relief.

Justification has to do not only with the subject of inspiration, I will never speak of the muses without speaking of constancy, method and chance, but precisely there lies the key, that between the coffee grounds of the breakfast and the freshly laid laundry, one glimpses a shadow, a shape or a colour and the mechanism has to start rolling immediately. In the most everyday practices, infinite stories are hidden waiting to be seen and told.

At the same time, I find very unproductive all those mornings in which one sits in front of the blank sheet, the lathe or the computer and is not able to give “foot with a ball” falling into an infinite circle of frustration and tiredness that ends up leaving us with no strength for anything else and what is worse, with a long list of unfinished tasks.

The search for the right balance between the discipline obtained through routines and the freedom to improvise and let oneself be carried away by impulses and one’s own needs, is the germ that has made El Atelier Extraordinario grow.

This atelier already existed before it was named, it had been forged for several years, perhaps hesitantly, but with the certainty of knowing that there was no other way of being, nor of doing.

By strengthening the name and the physical place I was helping myself to believe that this “slow” life project has a meaning and that this is none other than to find my own way of doing things, a tailor-made job with the ability to constantly modify to suit me. A human rhythm of life, which does not differentiate the personal from the work as if behind each work there was not always a person.

Live slowly, play often and wonder more.