Remember those 3D posters? If you looked at them long enough with squinted eyes you could see an image of the Eiffel Tower, or King Kong.
India is like that for me. At first it’s just dirty and poor. There’s garbage everywhere. But after a couple of days, I start to see the smiles the people wear. I notice people with barely enough food for themselves sharing with the monkeys. The temples twinkle with mirrors and delicate tile flowers.
In the next few months, the collective Archeo crew will be spending time in India, Japan, Europe, Burma and Thailand. The ratio of fun to work will be high because very little of what we do feels like work.
We’ll be doing, ahem, research in Europe, if you can define research as stopping by our favorite galleries and talking with the shopkeeps about trends in art and design. And we’ll be relentlessly scouring warehouses of artifacts in India, which in translation means being dazzled by temple art punctuated by gallons of masala tea and sparkling conversation with the Hindi sect.
When we unveil the goods we’ve chosen over the summer, we’ll do it with the joy of having drunk in other cultures and the satisfaction of having gleaned the most delicious pieces of art that we could find anywhere in the world.
Work?