The impulse to travel to other cultures is born from a deep desire to see ourselves through different eyes. Environments that do not confirm our worldview surprise us, and in doing so, they offer a new lens: a foreign mirror and therefore a revealing one. The fascination lies in realizing that although we live on the same planet, each culture has developed such singular ways of living, feeling, and making meaning that at times it seems we inhabit entirely different worlds. And yet we are all human, traversed by the same essential questions.
Landscapes can shape us: those born by the sea learn the salt, the fish, and the horizon; in the mountains, they learn the cold, the silence, and the ways of herding; in the city, the noise, the crossings, the contracts. Each environment speaks to the interior of those who dwell in it, and that dialogue is what forms beliefs, rhythms, rituals, and choices. The outer world molds the inner world, and vice versa.
Traveling, then, is more than moving the body; it is offering oneself to the impact of a new light, a new language, different colors and flavors. It is allowing these new layers to reflect us. Often, we seek to experience ourselves in unfamiliar ways—more authentic, perhaps bolder, or simply more alive. We are like stones sculpted by the flow of water: culture gives us shape, but also hardens us in certain places. By placing ourselves physically in contact with other traditions, we allow new currents to reach us and polish what has become rigid or forgotten.
To be with people is more than to read about them; it is to listen with the body. To be present under the sky that shaped them, to eat the same food, to breathe the same air. It is to accept the discomfort of the unfamiliar as a gesture of humility. When we allow ourselves this kind of immersion, we rediscover a certain innocence—a freshness. Leaving our comfort zone and opening ourselves to foreign experiences is healthy: it creates new neural connections, awakens our capacity for attention, empathy, curiosity, and engagement with our origins, and consequently, with ourselves.
Our identity is not autonomous. We are composed of everything that has been offered to us: our name, our language, the air, the sounds, the dogmas, the absence or excess of all these things. What we call “I” is a sculpture carved over time, a woven fabric of threads braided by many hands.
Still, for a culture to become recognized and solid, it needs roots. And for that, people must maintain a deep commitment to the structures of tradition. When I went to India to learn the art of thangka painting, the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism, I benefited from a millennia-old tradition, robust and resilient. In order to be able to paint thangkas, it was essential to immerse myself in Tibetan culture, because this art does not emerge solely from technique, but from lived experience.
I sought out experiences that would shape me and bring me closer to the Tibetan soul: hearing “tashi delek” every day as I entered the classroom; bowing before the master; presenting my drawings while kneeling in front of his elevated seat covered in sheepskin rugs; observing how he moistened the brush in his mouth; tasting sweet chai; how he glided the brush to correct my sketches . . . that hand carrying the weight of his own story, of his masters who had once painted the Potala Palace, now touching my lines. That is transmission, and it includes the essential element of time.
I spent three years by his side, every single day, being slowly introduced to his lineage, drawing closer, little by little, to the living mind within him and all the masters who lived through him. I would never have been able to paint thangkas had I not lived by his side. Because, again, this is not just about technique, but about belonging to the spiritual bloodline of the master, the one who holds and represents a knowledge beyond himself. Without those elements, sustaining the act of painting a thangka would have been impossible.
To paint a thangka begins with a sense of commitment to the lineage: it is not about “me” as an individual, but about the bond with tradition. The clear difference is that the contemporary artist is in search of their voice, their note, their symbol, their color that marks them; a way to communicate with the world and to exist. A culture seeks something similar: it also aims to define and express itself, not as an individual, but as a collective. We can move between these two spheres without conflict, drawing from the treasures of each and returning, more whole, to the place where we feel we exist.
After this period of study, I spent another five years working on murals for a temple in southern Brazil. Only after such immersion and sustained practice in traditional thangka art was I finally able to open a blank canvas and freely create the images that had long inhabited my dreams, as if they had been simmering inside me like a pressure cooker. Having painted for so long within rules gave me the force of release in creation, and I simply surrendered to the power that opposite forces can spark. Because freedom, when supported by discipline, gains depth. Thangka art gave me discipline so that I could express myself on another level, with freedom. I wasn’t altering traditional thangkas, which I’ve always chosen to preserve in their essence. The free painting I began creating came only after being trained in someone else’s voice; not to adopt that voice as my own, but to use the same disciplined hands to discover my own.
In 2025, I created a journey to Tibet for contemporary artists. We went to the Maisu Valley, a land of artisans: sculptors, painters, tailors, woodworkers, calligraphers, and ceramists. Our host, Dawa Drolma, embodies the balance between acquiring modern tools and keeping the freshness of traditional arts alive. Dawa-la was born in that very valley, surrounded by mountains and tradition, the daughter of a renowned local sculptor. As a child, she fell gravely ill. She recalls worms coming out of her skin and being considered nearly dead. Her father, in silent desperation, walked for days along steep mountain trails to the nearest city in search of a cure for his daughter. The illness, it was discovered, came from the meat of a yak infected by a diseased wolf. Her recovery was slow. During the months she spent in the city, Dawa met foreign volunteers. Fascinated by the cameras they carried, she began to capture images, creating short films with an intuitive, lyrical gaze.
One of those short films was awarded, and that small open window became a door. She received support to study in Canada, where she chose the path of entrepreneurship. But instead of staying abroad, Dawa decided to return to her native village. There, she encountered a fragile reality: many artisans, masters of ancestral crafts, were giving up their practices, unable to survive in the face of a modern market where cheap plastic and the speed of industrial production were slowly replacing the patient rhythm of handmade art.
With practical vision and deep sensitivity, Dawa founded a cooperative among the local artisans. She organized workflows, support networks, and above all, gave a renewed voice to the art of her people. She produced documentaries and short films that showed the world, with beauty and dignity, the value of these ancient skills. Through this, the mountain artists were able to find their place in the present landscape, not as relics but as living creators with something essential to offer our times.
Quietly and gracefully, Dawa became an archetype of what our times need most: someone who does not sever ties with the past, but reimagines it; who doesn’t flee the root, but breathes new life into it. She extended a bridge between what seemed to be dying, the seeds on the ground, and everything that could still bloom. Her story is not only one of personal triumph, but of collective reinvention. She represents the healing that takes place when the past finds its rightful place in the present; when tradition, welcomed by young hands, learns a new language to continue existing.
That’s why there was no better place for us to stay than Dawa’s small and charming guesthouse. Inside her father’s sculpture and metal workshop, we held performative calligraphy sessions, writing on semi-nude bodies an ephemeral script by my friend, the artist Catarina Gushiken, who traced words on the skin of each member of our group. These moments aligned with our contemporary exploration while we spent our days learning from traditional masters. A true fusion.
From another perspective, I observed how a contemporary lens could support traditional structures without distorting them. In many ways, tradition does not encourage individuality, or at least it’s not its primary concern. And that is beautiful and necessary in its own right. But contemporary art invites the artist to ask: “What pulses within me?” This question can bring fresh vitality to traditional practice, allowing the artist to recognize where their personal life resonates with the lineage.
Tradition sustains; contemporaneity provokes. And perhaps the future of art—of those expressions that truly touch the human spirit—lies precisely in the space where these two forces listen to one another.
In a time when everything leans toward uniformity and speed, recognizing the value of cultural diversity and ancestral wisdom becomes an act of resistance. Traditional arts, like those we encountered in the mountains of Tibet, remind us that the future cannot exist without memory, and that listening to elders, to their precise gestures and silences filled with time, is as urgent as innovation itself. Tradition does not confine us: it guides us. And young people, if they hope to create something that truly matters, must first know where they come from and who they come from. Only then can they move forward without losing themselves. The world needs roots as much as it needs wings.
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