Tous les penseurs, sans chercher
Qui finit ou qui commence,
Sculptent le même rocher :
Ce rocher, c'est l'art immense.
Poème à M. Froment Meurice, Les Contemplations, Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Æmilia Barcelona, a Franco-Spanish fashion brand
I arrived in Spain in the summer of 2019, in the charming Catalan city of Castelldefels: a privileged environment south of Barcelona, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Garraf Natural Park.
A move abroad forced me to close my first sewing workshop, located in Poitou. Using 100% French and ecological materials, and a 100% local clientele, it was impossible to relocate such a business without tearing out its soul.
It took me five years before I considered rebuilding a new workshop here in the Barcelona region.
Æmilia Barcelona, my new artisanal textile design brand, inspired me to create something lighter and more personal. With it, I simply let myself be carried away by the pleasure of fully expressing my creativity and my art of living.
And if sowing these little fragments of beauty, color, and light in your daily life helps make you happier, then I'll happily bite into this cherry on the cake.
My name is Émilie, le joli belongs to you
How many Emilies, born like me in the 1980s, have adopted the graceful adjective from Philippe Chatel's famous song as their middle name? Émilie Jolie...
I can't say that it's unpleasant to be described as ‘pretty’, just because that song says so. In fact, it's quite an advantage: why try to contradict a legend? Like other Émilie's, I've always taken this jingle as a kind compliment. Even (and especially) when it wasn't.
Could it be the breeding ground for my love of beauty? Perhaps, after all. Thank you Philippe! In any case, this love was the subject of many predictions in my childhood. And it's also what later led me to the world of communication and marketing: this desire to make just about everything beautiful, even what wasn't.
It seems obvious that the mafia of organised lies was not the right place to defend and share my humanist values, such as freedom, human dignity, honesty, tolerance, critical thinking, fraternity and respect for living beings.
But it took me a long time to internalise this, to experiment with it over and over again, until I fully accepted that I didn't belong there, that through art and craft I had much better things to offer.
Nature, a source of infinite inspiration
A lover of life, I'm often in nature. In the heart of the Garraf Natural Park, I breathe. I watch my dog run freely, I observe robins, redstarts, hoopoes, magpies, gray wagtails, and sometimes parakeets. I listen to their songs, participate in their conversations, hear about my friend the carob tree, and scrunch and smell the sprigs of thyme, rosemary, and lavender. These moments fill me with happiness.
Nature, wherever it is, is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for many creators. And for good reason: it is both our muse and our oxygen.
On this subject, I've personally observed that watching a squirrel wander by doesn't nourish me as much as picking up dirty socks. And I have a very personal theory about this.
Like many of you, I'm in a hurry, and aside from my creative moments and yoga sessions, I have a very difficult time incorporating mindfulness into a daily routine punctuated by work, cleaning, class pick-ups, cooking, homework, pets, games, shopping, paperwork, arguments, and more.
And then, in the heat of the moment, my gaze falls on a beautiful object lying around: a lovely cork glasses case I sewed a long time ago, or an absolutely divine porcelain mug my parents recently passed down to me.
In a second at most, beauty awakens me: I am spontaneously reconnected to the present moment. Fully there. It's the power of contemplation, the power of art. And what power!
These beautiful things I love to create with my hands, in which I place a kind and sincere intention, with which I express my point of view on the world—I imagine them making you smile, making you press pause, making you feel good. And even if art isn't expected to be useful, this idea enchants me.
Handcraftes creations with great powers
Do you, too, ever doubt whether you've watered the plants properly or locked the door before leaving? We perform these small, everyday actions so mechanically that it's difficult to assign them, each and every one of them, the appropriate time and space: was it this morning? Yesterday?
While we've learned to perfectly optimize our time by completing our tasks like a well-oiled machine, we can still observe a downside: we're not really there, with what we're doing. We're thinking about everything except the here and now.
But is it really important to engage in mindfulness when we're picking up a disgusting mess of hair from the bottom of the bathroom sink?
Actually, yes. It's even crucial, because reconnecting with the present moment is essential for our mental health. It reduces our stress, soothes us, and holds another power: that of rekindling our original joy.