Maker’s Story
Daniel is a South-Tyrolean artist currently living between Paris and some mountains. Born in Northern Italy, where he spent is his childhood leaving for the Netherlands at the age of 19. Studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven and by 2012 had established a diverse portfolio of interests, skills and experience with a focus on ceramics, textiles and graduated Cum Laude from the Man and Leisure department. Filled with creativity and an urge to face work he moved in 2013 to Paris. There he worked for 5 years as the creative assistant of Lidewij Edelkoort, observing and absorbing, traveling the world, giving lectures, teaching at universities whilst learning about textiles, image and creative consulting.Â
 Life in Paris ultimately just as unruly as the city itself, where there was a need to reorient, to touch some ground and to start from the earth. In 2018 following his pursuit of textile, Daniel went to India and then to Nepal, where he was looking for a surrounding, for people, animals and some land which in symbiosis could help him to develop his first collection of rugs. Nepal gave him all of what he was seeking and surprisingly reconnected him to the mountains of South Tyrol, where he was born and rooted. Two intensive years of working simultaneously on his rugs, artworks and photography have followed. Today Daniel is proud to present us with the treasures he has found on his journey of foot and mind, of hand.Â
The collection is realised in collaboration with van Caster and is connected to the local spinners and weavers as well as it is interwoven with the yak farmers who live in very remote areas high up in the Himalayas. LUM is the beginning of a long-term research project into sometimes rare or forgotten, sometimes daily and astonishing basic, or in reverse very intricate techniques of fibre-processing and rug crafting.  Â
The fibre is the beginning and expression of all textile quality, it defines the lifetime of a rug, the way it ages the way it lasts. Therefore Studio Daniel Costa choses to work with selected fibres such as yak wool, which has been used by Himalayan nomads to make clothes, ropes, rugs and tends, it is remarkably strong, has a primordial tune, a reassuring hand and a gentle shine. Tibetan sheep wool is characterised by its long and durable nature. Nettle is a plant fibre with innate strength and silent beauty, lending firmness and tactility to textile. In folklore nettle is attributed to the powers of fertility and protection. The collection also includes goat hair, which is another mythological fibre, said to protect from evil, it is antibacterial, archaic, rough and lasting.Â
Studio Daniel Costa aims for the highest level of craftsmanship as well as for the highest possible quality in fibre, revaluing the maker, the hand and the hand-made, durability and the emotional value of textile. LUM is the humming of a love-song to hand and fibre, matter and people, animals, plants and the fertile soil. An ode to the hand and the hand-me-down.
Images courtesy of Juliette Chètien & Studio Daniel Costa.Â
