Japan: Festivals & Rituals
For the exhibition “Japan: Festivals and Rituals”, the Museum do Oriente asked us to design and produce artifacts for the museum shop.
We began our research by getting to know more about the motto around this exhibition, with the explanations of the curator Sofia Alves and the rest of the Museum’s conservation team, we got to know the Shinto and Buddhist culture through the artifacts and rituals which inspired the exhibition. Thus, together with the shop manager, Sofia Monjardino, two sets of memorabilia were selected for domestic context that, with illustrations by Aurora Pavón, emanate the spirit of Japanese festivals and rituals.
Emas are wooden votive plaques that are hung in shrines to make wishes, where on one side is drawn or printed the deity whom the message written on the back is intended for. In our interpretation, we ask Kitsune and Maneki neko, traditional elements of Japanese popular culture, to represent prosperity and good luck, believing that they will make the good memories of the exhibition last.
Shrines are symbolic places of devotion in the Shinto religion, the site of some of the rituals represented in the exhibition. We wanted to bring this spirit into visitor’s homes by representing in a set of fridge magnets some iconic aspects of Japanese culture, such as the Torii, the entrance portico of Shinto shrines, Amaterasu, the goddess of the Sun or Hanami Dango rice dumplings.