We have decided to link our tenth anniversary to the topic of freedom.
Probably because our journey and our decisions in the past years have been completely void of external conditioning. We followed our inclinations, our creative input, our own tastes, we were free to choose. We wanted it and we forced ourselves to comply with it, sometimes, facing consequences.
I for one am a free spirit and, as we know, fighting conventions, not paying attention to the labels that society imposes, taking your life into your own hands without allowing the judgement from others to tarnish you, comes at a price.
If I reflect on the concept of freedom in its broader meaning applied to our present day, I realise that it contains many and diverse hues; and if I think of the vast external conditioning, both implicit and explicit, that we are exposed to, then we can perhaps say freedom doesn’t really exist.
In that regard a phrase by Enzo Biagi comes to mind, he believed “Freedom is like poetry:
it doesn’t require adjectives. It is freedom”. Therefore, it is not an absolute value, but it is subjective, it encloses infinity within and attempting to define it makes it simplistic.
Seeing as the concept of freedom intended as freedom of thought, of choice, of conscience, of religion, of creative expression, passes through and has passed through the need to also be revolutionary, pioneering, protester, out of the box, we briefly travelled through history and have realised that this year is the anniversary of important revolutionary events that changed the ways of life and of feeling for the generations that followed.
From the fifty-year anniversary of the first man on the Moon to the release of ‘Easy Rider’, to the 50 years since the Moratorium day march, and Woodstock that set an entire generation apart, the doors have opened on a new approach to life, becoming the emblem of freedom and an objection to the old political and social systems.
Each of these events has sparked a something new, a mental openness, a revolution just as LYF revolutionized this field of publishing by following its independent path, giving voice to a movement based on creativity. The same goes for our designers. With their visions they have revolutionised the way the whole world ‘sees’, by following their own personal point of view and innovating technology of the shapes and materials in an obsolete and idea-less field.
Before we go, we leave you with a quote by Isaiah Berlin:
“The Essence of liberty has always lain in the ability to choose as you wish to choose, because you wish so to choose, uncoerced, unbullied, not swallowed up in some vast system; and in the right to resist, to be unpopular, to stand up for your convictions merely because they are your convictions. That is true freedom, and without it there is neither freedom of any kind, nor even the illusion of it.”
Enjoy!
Cristina Frasca
