Joseph del Duca
What is Iyasu Rōpu
DISCOVER THE STORY
Everything reforms, changes, transforms.
Just think of how science describes the creation of our planet: a destruction and violence, together with a whole series of alchemical events that over the course of millions of years have led it to be that wonderful balance that today we can see with our eyes.
Feudal Japan was poor in metals, that were used strictly for basic necessities - agriculture and weapons - from this it received a great creative push towards a culture still famous toda for its spirituality and aesthetic harmony.
Shibari means to tie, it is a word that is often heard in THE Japanese culture, it can and could be found in the everyday life of a simple action or in the sacredness of a ritual. The use of the rope used for imprisonment was founded at the hands of the Sumurai, (also here I’d like to call it poetry even though in this case it is a context of violence), they created an aesthetic code that, through the variation of colours and the types of ligatures, they cataloged and identified the social class and the type of crime committed by the person involved. From 1400 to 1800 the binding was closely connected to imprisonment, torture and humiliation. Shortly after the mid-1800s, which was a great period of improvement for the nation, torture was abolished and the ropes underwent a vast and profound transformation, it remained a martial art that – although less famous than others that come from Japan – still exists today under the name of Hojōjutsu.
Morphee Photo
The use of the rope is also found in Kabuki theater, street performances where they often did demonstrations of wars and fragments of the dark period, which come from the change of the emperor that they had just left. In this period, in my personal opinion the words that stand out most could be "rigor", "control" and "exorcise". At the beginning of the last century, Shibari underwent a new transformation, this time oriented towards art and eroticism. I discovered the ropes around 2015 and I was captivated by them, they pushed me to abandon everything else and devote myself full time to the study of them: poetry, aesthetics and the possibility of expanding my way of being an artist, to completing it and to completing myself.
The perspective change is total, it was no longer a question of reproducing a muse with any material, it was a matter of sculpting the muse itself and at the same time being part of the same work of art. After many years and the many people who have relied on me over the years, I have realized that there can be so much more, that using the right methods and the right energy the ropes can bring not only benefits, but they can even lead to resolve some events of our past and push us towards a process of psycho-physical self-healing, relieve social pressure and help us break pre-set patterns of an atavistic moralistic education.
This is how Iyasu Rōpu was created, joining the ropes to the Holistic Arts, to spirituality and – hoping to bring a little equilibrium – to bring unconditional love where man has brought destruction and suffering, trying to be an alchemist and transform into gold and light something that people today see as abuse, vice or perversion. The evil is not in things or objects, but in the use made of them, which is too often forgotten by our conscience.
Love and Light
