A quarterly specialized journal
The Message Of Folklore from Bahrain To The World

An Artistic Comparison Of The Heritage: Calligraphy, Crafts And Creations

Issue 12
An Artistic Comparison Of The Heritage: Calligraphy, Crafts And Creations

Ali Arayseyya (Tunisia)

If we observe the recent international cultural scene, we will clearly notice the attitude to build unilateral culture. Such culture is based on highly technical, technological and communicational structures. This strategy aims making a dominating and exclusive discourse which negates the other.

This negation is justified by the idea that the other’s culture is traditional; hence it is an illustration of regress, enclosure and it is unqualified for modernization. However, rewriting the heritage and understanding it artistically, aesthetically and intellectually all this is really digging in the nature of our existence and a recognition of the cultural  facts of our identity. Moreover, all this is a contribution in a culturation and dialogue based on understanding and cultural legality with the other.  The act of formation is a meaningful act. It is an act aims to transform fictional ideas to an aesthetical vision. In other words such a vision is the formation of expressing deliberation and meaning. The process of the calligraphically and artistic reformation of the heritage is really a process of exaltedness for our feelings and their social capacity. The artistic craftsman work with traditional dimension is usually seen in an abstractive way which should be understood in the context of Islamic Arabic art.  The Islamic Arabic culture has seen periods of conflict which was essential for the challenge of the domination of innovative and initiative thinking. Such a challenge has created a conductive atmosphere for the establishment of groups, factions, scholars, scientists and philosophers. However, the creative moment in this history is the attempt of a comparison linking between thinking and copying.  Abstraction in Islamic Arabic Art could be understood from the respective that it is a bridge between the heritage and free creative imagination. It should be mentioned that the artistic heritage is unqualified for the semi-folkloristic comparison which aims to traditionalize the previous Islamic Arabic artistic creations.  So to examine the heritage artistically is a creative revivalism. The real challenge is to mobilize the dynamic capacity of the wool or the silk, for instance. Consequently, the comparison should go as far as the diversity in forms, techniques and the engineer of signs of everything which is calligraphic form in its diversity of shapes and working with the elements and the substances. The calligraphic creator normally links between an artificial indication and a natural one. The calligraphy is both a craft and a formation while the word is a normal system. So, there is an interaction with an indicative system appears artificially and normally as well, because calligraphy is an artificial indication fact that word is a normal indication. So, calligraphy generally and Arabic calligraphy in particular is an art which substance is the word which is transformed to a visual structure. To sum up, the engineering of the Arabic calligraphy in its artistic abstraction is a representation of culture, images, values and memorial signs.

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