April approaches: craftsmanship as a rehearsal for freedom

The 25th of April is almost here.

The city is beginning to remember. On the walls, in the words. In the colorful posters that emerge between the gray. It’s a memory that comes back slowly, but never forgets its way.

At the Escovaria de Belomonte, the days go on as always: wood, bristles, hands at work. But there’s a certain different silence in the air. A kind of sweet tension. As if the month knows something important is approaching.

We don’t make speeches. We don’t sell symbols. But we make brushes — and that says something too. Because every brush made here is, at its core, a refusal of haste. Of blind production. Of the idea that everything has to be immediate.

And sometimes, freedom is that.

Being able to go slow.

Choosing the gesture instead of the noise.

Valuing the detail.

Some people think that the 25th of April lives only in the dates. We believe it also lives in the habits. In the way we treat the material, in the way we respect time, in the way an art is passed from hand to hand. The revolution isn’t over — it just changed form.

Five days before April, we think about what it means to open.

To open space.

To open ideas.

To open the future.

And maybe it all starts here.

With a well-polished wooden handle.

With the sound of the workshop.

With a pair of hands saying, without saying:

We are alive.

We are free.

We are making.