Raffia is a fibre that forgets nothing about the sun. Leather is a skin that forgets nothing at all. This is the first thing we learned in Athens: that a hide arrives at the workshop already carrying a history, and the craftsman's job is not to erase it but to decide which parts of it to keep.
Reading the surface
Laid flat on the cutting table, a full hide looks like a map. There are areas that are tighter and areas that are looser, faint lines where the animal moved, small marks that no two hides share. The people we are working with read these the way a weaver in Madagascar reads a bundle of raffia — by touch first, then by eye, and only then with a blade.
Nothing about this is fast. A cut made in the wrong place cannot be unmade, so the deciding takes longer than the cutting. We have watched a single hide be turned, folded, turned again and set aside for the next morning before a single line was drawn on it.
Why this matters to FELUS
Everything we make is singular. With raffia, the singularity comes from the hand that wove it. With leather, it comes from the hide itself before anyone touches it. Two objects cut from the same pattern will never be quite the same, and we find that reassuring rather than inconvenient.
Still no pictures
We know. We are keeping them a little longer. What we can say is that the material has been chosen, the hands have been chosen, and the first pieces exist — sitting in a workshop in Athens, waiting for autumn.