05/08/2022
Gutpla avinun all. I would like to take this time to explain what Kitek Dezign & Wear is all about - our ultimate visions, goals
and what we will be striving to hopefully achieve in the future to come.
Now, one of the main reason I think why we started
Kitek Dezign & Wear is because at this present time, when we walk around town and almost everywhere we go, we see design after design on fabric, meri blouses and kolos.
Now that is fine but if you think about it, those designs are created and rolled out to shops almost on a daily basis by persons who are not even indigenous to our beautiful country of Papua New Guinea. Most of these designs hold traditional customary significance to our ancestral heritage and for someone else to take advantage and just make money out of it does not really sit well with me. He/she does not even know what the actual ideology behind each design is. Each stroke, curve, cut and color has meaning. It belongs to us. It is our identity.
Now because that person does not really know what he/she is putting down in print, we start to notice changes in the designs, different patterns and colors are getting mixed together. It has now reached the point where the designs do not portray any deep cultural meaning. Everything has been blown out of proportion.
Now in this millennial age of boomboxes, smart phones and the internet, I am beginning to fear that we are slowly but surely starting to lose our understanding in our ancestral and traditional history. A major party to this diminishing situation is because our history has been largely oral. The other part that binds together
and support our oral history are these intricate design patterns, colors and ideas. Now we are in danger of losing that too.
Now as millennials, we can't really blame ourselves for what is currently happening because every person is struggling to make ends meet, to put food on the table, and for us to sit down and talk about ancestral and traditional stuff is quite frankly, a waste of time, and time is what we do not have. We live our lives on the fast lane
and we consider ideas that give us a quick score - something that can put food in our stomach every night. We forego ideas that are deemed not that profitable, a waste of time, and sadly, our ancestral and traditional heritage is slowly falling into that category.
Kitek Dezign & Wear was created to try and help address this current situation. We try to look up, study and talk about our traditional designs and patterns. Finally, we can put these ideas in print. In that way, hopefully, we can not only make our ancestral and traditional ideology profitable - thus making it interesting,
but also to ensure that the intricacy of the designs are kept accurate to strengthen our largely oral history for generations to come.
Now this great milestone might seem quite impossible to achieve but I hope that together, with the collective efforts of likeminded individuals, we can eventually make this idea a reality. Create a spark and start a fire.
To our indigenous Papua New Guineans aiding those who are destroying our traditional heritage for a quick buck, please stop. Let us come together to address this issue. They can own the factory, the fabric and the ink. But we must be the ones who decide how the design is to be portrayed. The idea belongs to us.
