May 6, 2013
“How do you translate “conservation” into Tibetan? The
word doesn’t exist.”
For years, I’ve heard about the conservation work that Luigi
Fieni has conducted in Mustang. Documentaries have been made – and countless
articles published – about his groundbreaking restoration of Tibetan Buddhist
murals dating back to the 15th century. I’ve followed Luigi’s work
with more than casual interest. In the 1990’s, I served as artistic director
for the painting of Tibetan murals in two newly constructed temples – one in
Sarnath, India and one in the Catskills. But it wasn’t until last month that I
met him at a party in Kathmandu. He’s currently stuck in the Valley, pending
the Home Ministry’s signing off on his work-visa, a permit he has to attain
before he can legally return north to Mustang. Regrettably, this has become an
annual ritual: Luigi waiting for the Home Ministry to grant him a work-visa for
a project that has been internationally hailed – for well over a decade.
In any case, Luigi’s interminable wait became my stroke of
good fortune. A few days after our initial meeting the following interview
ensued, conducted in Raju Bikram Shah’s Shangri-la Hotel garden.
…
DUNHAM: From Rome to Mustang. There’s a story here. Let’s
begin with your childhood.
LUIGI FIENI: I came from Cisterna di Latina, a little town
near the seaside, a half-hour drive from Rome. I started drawing when I was
five actually. But following my parent’s advice, I studied science, so I never
studied art. Instead, I studied aeronautical engineering, all the while
drawing, just for myself, trying to refine my skill – painting as well. But
after a couple of years of engineering I said, “OK, this sucks. This is not
what I want to do.” So I quit university and entered a kind of psychological
war with my parents and all my relatives, because I was giving up something
that would give me a secure future. At least in Italy, there is this stereotype
that doctors and engineers are respectable and going to be privy to the
top-paying jobs, while artists…
But I quit school. And I didn’t know what I was going to do.
I just started airbrush painting for myself and for – not companies, but –
individuals who wanted their objects painted: trucks, surfboards, snowboards
helmets, bikes – whatever I could do to make money. But I was still wondering
what I was going to do when I “grew up”.
Anyway, through this work I realized that I was very good at
copying styles. Because usually for this kind of work, the client would give me
a photo from a magazine and they wanted an exact replica. So after a couple of
years of this half-job-half-despair, I thought, “Well maybe this could be
linked to some kind of conservation.” So I enrolled in the Conservation
Institute in Rome and, all of sudden, life became easier.
Unlike when I was studying engineering, I comprehended the
academic aspects of conservation immediately. And coupled with my drawing
skills I became one of the top students in the school.
As it happened, just before my graduation, in 1999, there
was this professor in the school who was just about to start a project in
Mustang: Professor Rodolfo Lujan Lunsford. He used to be a conservator for
UNESCO and many international organizations. He had worked in Cambodia, Ajanta
in India, Burma, Mongolia – many renowned places. I was very lucky because the
only year that the professor taught at my school was the year I graduated.
The professor was in contact with John Sanday Associates, an
architecture and conservation company, here, in Kathmandu, run by John Sanday.
Sanday got the funding from the American Himalaya Foundation for the project in
Mustang. John and Rodolfo had worked together ten years before. John contacted
Rodolfo about the Mustang project and that’s how it got off the ground. John
told him to bring an assistant, Rodolfo selected me … and here we are. That’s
how this became a reality. Super cool the way this whole thing interlocks.
Later, when I told this story to some of the monks in
Mustang – it was quite sweet – they said, “Oh, you must be a reincarnation of
one of the old painters.”
DUNHAM: It does seem karmic. When did you first go to
Mustang?
FIENI: 1999. One week after graduation.
DUNHAM: Wow.
FIENI: Yeh, it all happened very quickly. I went from very
low self-esteem to feeling like I had the dream job – all in a very short
timespan. At that time, there was no Internet – no google earth search for me –
so I went home and got some books to find out about Mustang and I thought, “Oh
shit, that’s far away.”
I served as Rodolfo’s assistant for four years. Then in
2004, he left the project and I became in charge. And from 2004 forward, I have
been leading the conservation in Mustang.
DUNHAM: Let’s talk about the actual coservation.
FIENI: The idea is restoring wall paintings from the 15th
century, in Lo Manthang [the capital of Mustang]. The pilot project was
Thubchen Monastery, built in 1472. Since our sponsor, the American Himalayan Foundation,
wanted to have a development project, this plan required the training of a lot
of the local people in Mustang. The idea was to take farmers from Lo Manthang
and slowly transform them into restorers
– to give them the knowledge and skills to take care of their own cultural
heritage.
DUNHAM: Were there no local artists – thangka painters –
living in Mustang?
FIENI: None.
DUNHAM: The tradition had been lost?
FIENI: That’s right.
DUNHAM: What were the conditions of the Thubchen murals in
1999?
FIENI: Oh, I still had hair at that time. I pulled them all
out when I saw the poor condition of the murals. It was a disaster. Damaged
wall paintings – OK, darkened by varnish, age, grime and butter-lamp smoke –
but that was the least of our problems. That’s easy to fix. The real problems
were with the structure of the building and the fact that the wall paintings
were detaching from the walls. In many areas, the paint layer was flaking off.
There was water leakage from the ceiling and rising dampness from the floor. So
there were a lot of challenges. Whatever you studied in conservation textbooks
– the case histories, the bad conditions analyzed – they were all there in
Thubchen. Mold, biological attacks – whatever – it was all there.
DUNHAM: Describe what Mustang was like in 1999.
FIENI: Before I do that, I should describe how I got there in 1999. From the maps, you couldn’t
tell how many roads went up there, or what kind of roads. I had no idea. From
here, in Kathmandu, we took a plane to Pokhara. Then we took a plane to Jomsom.
DUNHAM: Oh god, I’m familiar with the flight from Pokhara to
Jomsom. It is … memorable.
FIENI: Yes. I was 25 at the time and maybe at that age, you
aren’t so aware of the risks. But flying in a twelve-seat plane up through the
deepest gorge in the world [the Kali Gandhaki], where there is fierce wind
almost 24-7, and the plane is just bouncing around all over the place –
DUNHAM: Like riding in the belly of a deranged hummingbird.
There’s Nilgiri coming straight at you and Dhaulagiri on the left and Annapurna
I on the right and –
FIENI: And even more stupefying, you don’t see the trees…you
see the leaves of the trees. And you
say, “Maybe we are flying a bit too close.” So for the twenty-minute flight,
you are frozen.
Then you land in Jomsom and you ask, “OK, where’s the
monastery?” And the guide answers, “Actually, we are going tomorrow and it’s
three days on horseback.” Indiana Jones style.
DUNHAM: Italian cowboy heading up the mountain.
FIENI: Yeh, exactly. I had ridden horses a couple of times
before but never on a mountain trail at 4000 meters and especially with the
kind of tackle the locals used for riding. You see horses in Europe with nice
saddles. In the first years especially, the Mustang saddles were made out of
wood – just four small planks of wood, two carpets on top of that and your butt
on it … for three days.
DUNHAM: How much equipment did you have to take with you?
FIENI: That was one of the biggest challenges at the
beginning. You had to plan so carefully. The exact amount you needed – not too
little but not too much, either, because we were going up with caravans of many
horses and porters. Once you were up there, you couldn’t call the conservation
shop and say, “I forgot something.” Even if you forgot something, you had to
make do with what you had brought. No second chances. I learned a lot from
that.
I’ve also been working in Italy – I split my year between
Mustang and Italy. In Italy, if you don’t like your paintbrush, you just walk
to the shop and buy another one. But in Mustang, you improvise all the time:
“OK, see that guy over there with the beard? He hasn’t shaved. We’ll shave him
and use some of his hair for a brush.” That’s the way it is in Mustang. Or when
the paintings are detaching from the walls, you have some special conservation
tools in Europe you can use just for propping. These things don’t exist in
Mustang. And the walls are 8 meters high.
DUNHAM: Did you use bamboo scaffolding?
FIENI: No, we got wood from China. And at that time, there wasn’t
yet a road from China. We had hundreds of porters carrying logs over the
Himalaya from Tibet. Sounds crazy, but it was the easiest way to carry wood
because from Jomsom or Pokhara it would have been too expensive.
We really had to be innovative on every level. Sometimes we
used mattresses or plywood to prop things up. Here’s another example: We had to
detach a wall painting from a wall. It was a relatively newer painting, but
someone during the history of the monastery had built something on top, which
forced us to use honeycomb panels [auxiliary support replacements]. In Italy,
you just go buy the panels. Here, we had to build the large panels in Kathmandu
and transport them all the way up to Mustang.
DUNHAM: What about the challenge of lighting the interior of
the monastery? There are very few windows – if any – in Tibetan gompas.
FIENI: It was a big challenge. When you are studying
conservation, you concentrate on the importance of replicating daylight to
determine the exact colors of the painting. So we brought a couple of those
special lights over from Italy, but it was difficult because of the generators
available here in Nepal. They were quite unreliable. We needed a lot of power –
20,000 watts – so we had to use tractor-driven dynamos and, even if the Nepali
generators were powerful enough, they were too heavy to transport to Mustang.
So we purchased some from China – supposedly brand new generators. We started
them up and after a couple of hours they broke down. And I thought, “Oh, shit,
these are brand new.” So our guy took them apart. Well, on the outside, they
were brand new but inside? I don’t know how old they were. These were the kind
of unexpected problems we encountered but somehow we managed.
DUNHAM: Did the locals really understand what you were
trying to do? Some of them must have found all the activity and equipment
disturbing – especially in regard to their holy site.
FIENI: When we first arrived, we had all the working
permits, the Department of Archeology approval – all that – but locals were
like, “Who are you? What do you want to do? You want to touch our monasteries?" Even though they could see very little of the interior of the monastery because
it was so dark inside – and it was
practically not used at all – the locals felt attached to their temple and wanted to know, “What is it that you are
doing that we can’t do ourselves?
What does ‘conservation’ mean, anyway?”
How do you translate “conservation” into Tibetan? The word
doesn’t exist.”
The conversation – or you could say the questioning --
actually started a couple of years before we arrived. The locals had been
convinced that it would be OK to have us come up to the site. But once they saw
us unpack syringes and drills, things like that, they became concerned.
DUNHAM: Syringes?
FIENI: One of the operations used, when the wall painting is
detaching, is that you knock on the wall;
you understand, by the sound, if there is a void behind that wall. So
you drill there and inject a special mortar. The locals interpreted this
operation as, “You are piercing our gods! They are not images, they are our
gods! They are going to be harmed, defiled! You cannot do that!”
So the Mustang community insisted on performing a ceremony
of de-consecration. With a mirror, they captured the life or soul of each image
in the monestary – transforming them from gods into mere drawings, lines and
colors. Only after the ceremony were we
allowed to try some small cleaning samples. And they were still very suspicious
about our work.
DUNHAM: What about the king of Mustang? [Jigme Dorje Palbar
Bista, born in 1933. Officially, the monarchy ceased to exist on October 7,
2008, by order of the Government of Nepal. Nevertheless, many Mustang residents
still regard Bista as king.] The king must have been supportive of your work,
otherwise the project would have never taken off.
FIENI: Actually, the king was the guy who initiated the
restoration.
DUNHAM: His approval was key.
FIENI: That helped, yet the community of Lo Manthang and
local monks ran the monastery, so everyone had a say in the matter.
Anyway, after we managed this trial, this small rectangle of
restoration – we cleaned a square meter – the king came to examine our work.
That square meter was pretty impressive: All of these
amazing colors were shining back! After removing the varnish and dirt, the
patch looked like it had been painted yesterday. The king was very impressed.
He said, “Wow, you guys are such talented artists. How did you paint this?”
And we said, “No, we didn’t paint. We just removed the dirt.
This is from the 15th century. Your ancestors did this.”
And that was the day that everything changed in Lo Manthang.
After the locals realized that we were involved with cleaning only, they said,
“OK, we need the help of these foreigners." And all the population of Mustang
turned in our favor, and we were allowed to start working.
DUNHAM: Pigment: What pigments had been used by the artists
in the 15th century?
FIENI: Actually, the most expensive ever used in history. In
Mustang, we can make a parallel with what Michelangelo was using.
DUNHAM: The original Mustang artists and Michelangelo could
have talked to each other and been on the same page.
FIENI: Exactly. It was more or less the same period – well,
Michelangelo was a bit later but – and they were using the same minerals to
make their pigment: malachite, azurite, lapis lazuli, cinnabar –
DUNHAM: Arsenic?
FIENI: Yeh, and all these semi-precious stones, which are
very expensive –
DUNHAM: And very poisonous –
FIENI: Very poisonous, yes, all of them are from metal –
from arsenium to mercury to copper, to…what else?
DUNHAM: Lead.
FIENI: Yes, lead for the orange. So all of those pigments
were there in the most beautiful shapes and forms and shadings.
DUNHAM: And because they were real pigments, there was
limited deterioration in their intensity.
FIENI: Exactly and they had been protected by varnish.
DUNHAM: What kind of varnish?
FIENI: We made some analysis and it was a mixture of oil and
tree resin. It’s kind of common, at least in Europe – in Asia it’s less common
to varnish, but in the monasteries I have worked on in the Himalaya, I have
often found varnish. In some cases, it had been applied long after the painting
was executed.
In the case of Mustang, the varnish was from the same period
as when the paintings were executed. This was an important distinction to be
made. If the varnish had been applied much later, the colors would have shown a
certain aging. Or there would have been darkening from the smoke emitted from butter
lamps, which was the only kind of illumination used in the temple. In the case
of the paintings in Mustang, there was nothing between the pigment and the
varnish.
All varnishes are transparent when applied, but with aging
they turn brown, red, black – according to the nature of the varnish. And they
practically hide the paintings. But when we removed the varnish, the colors
just shone back. And because of the quality of the pigments, they were
incredibly stable, especially in that dim light. They looked like they were
painted yesterday.
DUNHAM: Let’s break down the colors for my readers.
Malachite for the green –
FIENI: Yes. Azurite for light blue. Lapis Lazuli for the
very dark blue. It was generally thought that lapis had not been used in
Tibetan wall paintings. There was a legend surrounding the use of lapis but it
wasn’t found in the old masterpieces from Ladakh, Gyantse, or wherever. But in
Thubchen we found lapis lazuli. In fact, we found something that we had never
seen before: The Mustang artists had mixed azurite and lapis lazuli together to
create a medium blue. Super rare. For historians, this was a very exciting
discovery.
DUNHAM: In the restoration process, did you use real
pigment?
FIENI: No. In our conservation, we don’t work with pigments.
When we are touching up, we use watercolors. Conservation teams from different
countries have different philosophies about this. I come from the Italian
school of thought that, maybe, in fifty or a hundred years, something better
might come along. So that the next restorer that comes along in the future,
they have to be able to remove whatever you added extra on the wall painting.
There is this concept of restorability, which is very strong
in our Italian point of view.
You never reconstruct
what has already been destroyed.
And I was convinced that this was the right path. But when
we “finished” Thubchen monastery in 2004, the monks said, “What do you mean
‘you’re finished?'” You see, all the lower portions of the paintings had been
destroyed by dampness, so we hadn’t worked on the lower areas. It was all missing and the monks simply
could not comprehend that we considered our work completed.
DUNHAM: Another non-Western concept you must have
encountered up there was that Tibetan practitioners envision the murals as the
Pure Land. Cracks, missing areas, aberrations of any description are regarded
as bad.
FIENI: Exactly, because Tibetan Buddhist practitioners are
looking at real gods. They are not images. They are truly the gods. And they
have been consecrated. But it took me many years to understand that concept. I
resisted also because I was breaking the rules of what I had studied in Italy.
It took time for me to be able to adapt what I had studied in Rome to the
Tibetan way of seeing things. For the people of Mustang, re-painting the lower
walls was extremely important. But for me it was all new. Reconstructing
something so big? In Italy, they would chop off my hands. In Mustang, it was
their number one requirement of restoration.
Anyway, I slowly began to understand their priorities. And I
think that there should be a new theory of conservation adapted for countries
in Asia, Africa, South America – places where the soul or religiosity is very
strong. Whatever notions Western countries may have developed, when working on
non-Western religious buildings, those notions should not be applied.
DUNHAM: I agree. At what point did you begin training the
locals in Mustang to help with the restoration?
FIENI: From the beginning. All of them were farmers with no
previous training. We didn’t even have time to test who were the most suitable
to work with us. The project was created, in part, to distribute wealth
homogenously throughout the village. Also, the external architecture: We
employed 230 locals in carpentry, labor, etc. But there was no pre-selection.
The rule was that one person from each family could get a job with us. When you
were lucky, you had a very good employee. When you were unlucky, then you had
to improvise a job for them that would benefit the project. 90% of them were
illiterate – never touched a pen and yet we were giving them paintbrushes. It
was an incredible challenge.
Also, there was the limitation of language – the language
barrier. We had an interpreter, which was helpful, but luckily, in
conservation, there is a lot of information that can be shared by miming. We
were all Italians so [waving his hands] – miming: That’s our thing.
Little by little, one by one, we showed them how to fill up
a syringe with mortar and inject it, or how to clean a surface, over and over,
until they were confident in doing this. We began the learning process on empty
walls. If mortar was spilled, no paintings were damaged. We had to avoid any
mistakes occurring on 15th century paintings. But my point is that
we were teaching them technique by mime, not language. And, over time, language
was no longer an issue as we all kind of created a new language made up of
Nepali, Tibetan, English and Italian.
Another challenge was the caste system. In Tibetan Buddhism,
it shouldn’t exist. But in Mustang, there are three identifiable castes: the
royal family, the middle class and the lower caste made up of inherited
professions like blacksmiths and musicians. The latter live outside the city of
Lo Manthang on the riverside.
DUNHAM: And you had the three castes were working
side-by-side?
FIENI: Yes, but the problem wasn’t working side-by-side. The
problem was when they worked on scaffolding. If a lower caste worker was on top
of the scaffolding and a higher caste worker was below his feet, it always
ended up in fights. So where people worked in relation to other workers had to
be carefully planned to avoid this vertical placement issue.
DUNHAM: It’s now 2013. How close are you to completing the
project?
FIENI: At Thubchen, the conservation part is finished. We
worked on two major structures in Lo Mantang: Thubchen, which is a monastery
and Jampa, which is a temple, with three stories and all the mandalas. We
finished the conservation of Thubchen in 2004. In Jampa, we finished the
conservation in 2009.
But then the locals started looking for money to complete
all the paintings by themselves.
At that moment I got a bit worried: OK, they learned, but
they still had limitations and still needed guidance, especially if they also
wanted to do additional reconstruction. I sort of shut down all my Westerner
ethics and said, “OK, I want to do it and I convinced the American Himalayan
Foundation to accept this additional reconstruction program.
We went back to work on Thubchen in 2010. We began working
on approximately 350 square meters of wall. And in some cases, we are using
real pigments: lapis lazuli, azurite, malachite, cinnabar –
DUNHAM: 350 square meters is huge. Have you completed it?
FIENI: In theory, we should have completed by the end of
this year. But we’ve been confronted with unforeseen problems. Rising dampness
had returned to the walls. Mold stains. So we had to remove a lot of what we
had reconstructed. We had to call in new architects because the original
architectural company hadn’t finished the job correctly.
DUNHAM: What had the architectural firm failed to do?
FIENI: OK, on the lower sections of the walls there were no
paintings so who cares? But rising dampness can go up very high, and that was
what was happening – encroaching on work we had originally done. Luckily, the
original 15th century painting was unharmed, just the work we had
done in the last decade. Still, because of this, we won’t be able to finish the
reconstruction this year.
DUNHAM: How many locals from Mustang will you be employing
this year?
FIENI: Thirty-five. The team has shrunk a bit. Some passed
away, some moved to the U.S. and Korea.
DUNHAM: But both structures have been re-consecrated? Are
the local Buddhists worshipping inside?
FIENI: Yes, since 2004, when there was the first ceremony.
The monks use the buildings for their most important events: the creation of
the mandalas for the end of the summer, the religious dancing in May – the
major ceremonies are being held again there since – I don’t know how many
centuries.
DUNHAM: For interior lighting, are they still using yak
butter lamps?
FIENI: Ah, the butter lamps. Originally, it was very
difficult for them to understand a concept, which, for us, is very easy. When
we told them that the butter lamp smoke darkened the paintings, they said, “Oh
really? Never seen it.” So we dropped the subject but after three or four years
of them using the butter lamps, I went back to confront them about the lamps.
There are special sponges called Wishab. They absorb the
grime and soot – whatever is deposited on the surface and is not yet glued to the painting, which was the case of the
smoke. So I took the monks and some local people inside and we did some
cleaning with Wishabs and then I pointed out the difference. I said, “Look,
this cleaned area is what the whole wall looked like four years ago. Now
compare it to the part of the wall that hasn’t been cleaned.” They recognized
the problem.
So they decided to build some rooms outside the monastery
where worshipers who want to light a butter lamp are free to do so. Naturally,
since the monastery is a religious space, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition
demands that there are a couple of butter lamps to serve religious purposes.
But compared to the 500 or 600 that had been burning four years before –
cutting it down to two or three – has been a successful change, especially
because it was the local’s idea to build
the extra rooms outside. When the idea comes from the community, it’s 99%
probable that everyone will follow the leader’s example. If a foreigner comes
in and says, “Do this, do that,” they won’t give a shit.
DUNHAM: The interior – with just a couple of better lamps
lighted – must be much dimmer now. The locals are OK with that?
FIENI: Yes, especially now, when everybody has a flashlight
or battery-powered headlamp. If they really want to see the murals, they can
use their flashlights. It also depends on the area of the interior. In
Thubchen, there is a kind of skylight. If you go during the day, you can see
the walls.
DUNHAM: Traditionally, temple skylights were just wide-open
rectangles cut out of the roof, allowing snow and rain to come in. Is that the
kind of skylight in Thubchen?
FIENI: When we first arrived, it was: The ceiling was open
to the elements and direct sunlight flooded in. We had to make an adjustment.
Now there is a flat ceiling over the opening, slightly elevated above the rest
of the rooftop, with windows placed horizontally to prop up the top. The
elements are now sealed out and there is no direct sunlight.
DUNHAM: You mentioned that, in some cases, you were using
real pigment in Mustang. Do you start from scratch? Are you grinding your own
pigment?
FIENI: Yes, because if you buy the pre-ground pigments, the costs
are astronomical. So I trained my guys how to grind, how to prepare the
pigments out of the stone.
DUNHAM: That’s straight out of the Italian Renaissance:
“Come on, Leonardo, share your secret – what mixture are you using to get that
green?” Sitting around the fire, artists pumping each other for inside
information.
FIENI: Yes, exactly, “What did you put in that blue?” – that
sort of thing.
DUNHAM: In Mustang, mixing hues to match the original 15th
century hues must be very tricky.
FIENI: We don’t try to match the hue immediately. Because
when you have a huge white space, you start incorrectly guessing the colors.
The white will trick the eyes. First we make the drawing.
DUNHAM: With what?
FIENI: Pencil, charcoal. Then we use a snapping cord for the
grid and a kind of compass for the circular shapes. And we mainly copy the
original. Say we are copying a
Medicine Buddha: We copy the original but with different decorations.
Otherwise, it becomes clear that you are just copying—it’s not fresh. So we
create a new Buddha based on the old standard iconometry.
As for matching hues, we begin by applying a solid layer of
lighter color. Let’s say we’re beginning with malachite for green. Malachite is
a very, very light hue. To get it a bit darker, we mix it with the opposite –
either a little red or a little brown. It gives a bit of aging to the color.
But it will still be a light green. Once the solid color is applied over the
entire white surface, then, with watercolors, we start shading in until we match
the original paint.
DUNHAM: Let’s get really basic, here. I’ve got a big chunk
of malachite. What do I do next?
FIENI: You wrap the stone with several layers of cloth. Then
you put the wrapped stone into a large but shallow stone vessel with a lip all
the way around it. Then you slowly start hammering the malachite until it has
been reduced to a mass of small pebbles. Then you remove the pebbles from the
cloth wrapping and take a rectangular stone and start grinding – forward and
backward – over the pebbles until the pebbles have been reduced to a powder.
Then you transfer the powder to a mortar and you add a bit of hot water. Hot
water will help – not micronizing, exactly – but it does get the pigment very, very fine. And you do
that process for months. The whole process from stone to pigment can easily
take two months.
Then, it depends on the hue. Malachite, for example: The
more you grind, the lighter the green. You have to monitor the grinding every
day, to make sure it’s not too light. In the case of lapis lazuli, if you
over-grind, it becomes transparent.
The key for the grinders is to be patient. Incredibly
patient.
DUNHAM: Once you have arrived at the correct hue, is the
next step heating the glue?
FIENI: We use animal-skin-based glue. In Italy, we use
rabbit. Here, it could be buffalo, cow – it could be whatever. I don’t know. I
went to one of the thangka painters here in Kathmandu and asked for the best
glue. There is a stamp on the container. It say’s “Made in India.” But nobody
could tell me what it is. I just know that it comes as a protein gel. When you
need to use it, you boil water, then add the glue, and when the consistency is
just right –
DUNHAM: What is the
right consistency?
FIENI: That’s difficult to explain. This entails the
artistic side of process. You put your forefinger and thumb in the hot glue and
put them together and you know by its stickiness if it is too strong or too
weak. When you’ve got it right, you pour that into the mortar with the pigment.
And you mix them together for a couple of days before it is ready to be used.
Also, after a week or so of usage, you may have to add some heated water.
DUNHAM: Where do you get the gold for the embellishments? Is
it legal to buy it here? It used to be that it wasn’t.
FIENI: Yeh, yeh, it’s legal as long as it’s not smuggled.
DUNHAM: 22 carat?
FIENI: I’m not sure because it’s not stamped. Judging by the
look I would say around 22 carat. 24 carat is very warm looking. This is a bit
colder in appearance. And the glue that has been mixed with the gold can
influence the hue.
DUNHAM: My teacher [thangka master Pema Wangyal of Dolpa]
used to test everything on his brush by putting it between his lips: That’s how
he got the exact pointed-ness of his brush – not exactly a healthy procedure
given the toxicity of the paints.
FIENI: I do the same thing. But for the pigments I have to
warn my guys, “Guys, be careful.” Because even with watercolors, to test the
thickness of the line either by using your lips or by painting a line across
the top of your hand – when you are using cinnabar (mercury-sulfide), malachite
(copper carbonate hydroxide), copper-arsenite, it’s not very wise to be
painting your hands. And my friends here in Kathmandu – quite famous thangka
painters – they keep preparing the point of the brushes by painting a line on
their hands, and they’ve been doing this for ages, but…
DUNHAM: They’re not going to change.
FIENI: They’re not going to change. And they say, “Hey, look
at me. I’m fine. It’s not so toxic.” OK, maybe they are lucky but it’s better
not to risk the lives of my trainees.
DUNHAM: In the case of my teacher, he died of liver cancer
when he was about 50.
FIENI: I can understand. In Italy, in past generations of
artists – there are all the stories about them dying from tumors because of the
chemicals they came in contact with. Here, in Mustang, we push a lot for the
guys to take precautions and to use anti-gas masks.
DUNHAM: Gas masks?
FIENI: Here’s an example: We were in Lo Gekar. We were using
a very strong chemical called Dimethylformamide [usually shortened to DMF – a
solvent for chemical reactions, linked to cancer in humans, and thought to
cause birth defects] and you need to wear a mask; it’s heavy stuff. And we were
working in a small room and there were two clay statues that needed to be
cleaned. Those statues had been historically placed near the entrance of the
monastery. They were considered to be protector demons -- dharmapalas. My trainees were scared of working on them. I said,
“Come on, guys, the monastery has been de-consecrated. The dharmapalas won’t harm you. Just wear the masks.
But the guys didn’t believe me.
Anyway, I had to be away for a week and when I came back,
the guys hadn’t touched the statues except for one tiny area – about three
square inches. I asked, “What happened?” And they said, “We told you, the
statues are dangerous. The minute we started working on them, we got headaches
and started vomiting.” I asked, “Did you wear the masks?” And they hadn’t. When
I tried to explain that they vomited because they hadn’t worn the masks, they
still wouldn’t believe me. So I put on a mask and worked on the statues for
three hours, with them watching in the background. When they saw with their own
eyes that the demons didn’t kill me because I was “defiling” them – then and only then did the guys work on the statues.
DUNHAM: How old were the statues?
FIENI: Well, Lo Gekar supposedly predates the structures in
Lo Manthang. Supposedly dating back to the 7th-8th
century. If you follow the legend, it had to be built in order that Samye could
be built.
[The legend of Lo Gekar begins with a demon, which was
destroying the foundations of Samye Monastery, under construction, located in
south-central Tibet. Guru Rinpoche, who had just brought Buddhism to Tibet and
was overseeing the construction of Samye, pursued the demon southwest, deep
into Mustang. The two fought among Mustang’s snow peaks, desert canyons and
grasslands. Guru Rinpoche prevailed, and he scattered the demon’s body parts across
Mustang. The intestines fell down to where there is now the famous Mani wall.
The heart fell down to where Lo Gekar is now. They built shrines all over
Mustang to commemorate where the body parts of the demon fell and to celebrate
Guru Rinpoche’s victory over the demon.]
DUNHAM: Yeh, I know that story. Guru Rinpoche was in a lot
of places – a busy man.
FIENI: Well, he could fly. I would have done the same.
DUNHAM: And he didn’t need a visa.
FIENI: Yes, that too. And if you believe in the legend, Lo
Gekar dates back to the 7th-8th century. But from what we
could determine, the paintings we were working on were not 7th
century at all – they were painted much, much later: 19th century.
However, through the cracks, we could see that there were at least two layers
of older paintings.
And this was a common custom in temple painting. The
painters didn’t know about restoration. They didn’t know that there were
methods of cleaning dirty wall paintings. So if the paintings were not clean
anymore, they would either just destroy them or paint on top of the old
paintings. As I said, we found evidence of older paintings behind the newer
ones, but we could not gamble with what we already had – to take down the 19th
century paintings, only to find a tiny area of older painting worth restoring –
that would have been terrible.
DUNHAM: What’s left to do in Lo Manthang?
FIENI: My hope – apart from completing the project – is to
create an example for Westerners by training and using local teams.
We already started this some years ago in China. There was a
selection of five guys, who were the best in Sichuan, and they were training
conservation techniques to Chinese locals. Unfortunately, we were kicked out
about the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games because of the Tibetan riots
in Lhasa and other places. I had projects in Lhasa and in the Chengdu area.
Both projects were closed immediately. Americans have funded all of my projects
and you know how sensitive the Chinese are about that. But the local people I had
been working with proved that they could train other people, even after I left.
They trained the locals, worked together, lived together – just as I had done
in Mustang – they were getting along very well with each other, and with great
results.
So I believe in this process and that it should be spread
all over Asia. I am hoping to get more projects and train the teams as future
teachers. In this way, slowly-slowly, the knowledge of conservation can be
passed on and spread throughout Asia.
DUNHAM: It’s a damn shame you were kicked out of China.
FIENI: Especially since China could be a very good
propellant for this sort of work. China should be happy with the kind of work
I’m trying to do in Asia. I’m really trying to concentrate on respecting the
local cultures, against the Western theories and the Western colonization
mindset. I’ve tried to say as much, when documentaries were made about the
Mustang project, but the filmmakers invariably edit out all my political
anti-colonial statements.
DUNHAM: Why?
FIENI: They say it isn’t “nice” to be critical of China.
………………….
To visit Luigi Fieni’s website
CLICK HERE
To view
an eight-minute documentary about the Mustang project, produced in 2005
CLICK HERE
To
view the trailer of a later documentary, MUSTANG – JOURNEY OF TRANSFORMATION,
narrated by Richard Gere
CLICK HERE
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