Céline Jojo
Founder
Celine is the founder and maker behind Debashi. She works by hand from Hong Kong.
Her jewellery came second to her interest in postmodernism. She spent the majority of her stretch at the London School of Economics studying constructivism, exploring conditions of illegality in the Colombian gold trade.
Growing up in Hong Kong, where fine jewellery reigns, intrinsic value was codified in polish, purity, cut, and setting rather than relation and connection to the piece. Constructivism let her see these norms as convention rather than fact, and opened the space to work outside them.
Her connection to the world was harder to reconcile with postmodernism. That connection came through her late great-grandmother, Dabashie, who consistently visited her in prayer in the advent of her spiritual practice. Through the kilograms of inherited handmade Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox jewellery, Céline felt the charge of every hand that had made, mended and passed the pieces on. Amulets of protection, crosses of devotion, bangles of groundedness were all sent through generations with the intention of preserving, capturing and containing a belief into a wearable conduit. Shapes, engravings, weights, and patinas presented a language that predated her, objects of armoury and devotion.
This was the parallel motivation that postmodernism did not account for.
Jewellery changes the posture of the wearer.
Forgetting to wear a piece of jewellery is a small fragmentation of the self. In this way, the armouring effect of jewellery changes the posture of the wearer. A weighted bangle requires more effort when lifting a hand. A ring with a protruding stone teaches the hand to move gently. Each piece asks for a different posture, a different way of relating to the body and to the world.
Each piece begins by hand. The work starts by attending to a phenomenon, then gathers its histories, theories, and interpretations that fortifies its mythology. Only then is it reinterpreted into a new form.
— C.
