MUSEO DEL ORIGAMI VIDEOLIBRARY TODAY: The mystery of the Dragonfly In this new video, I will tell the story of some incomplete diagrams from the 19th century showing how to fold a dragonfly. The diagrams belonged to a Japanese encyclopedia, Kan-no-mado (also called Karagayusa) that had long been lost. It seemed impossible to solve the enigma, but when in 1952, Gershon Legman, who was studying the history of paperfolding, sent the incomplete drawings to the Argentinean Ligia Montoya, she figured out the missing steps. In 1960, Julia Brossman, an American student of art, found a copy of the drawings which had been copied by hand by anthropologist Frederick Starr (the drawings had been kept at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.). It was then possible to confirm that Ms. Montoya had not been wrong. The video will explain how to fold the dragonfly (or tonbo, in Japanese). To fully comprehend the story, I included in the museum website the original drawings from the Kanomado encyclopedia, as well as the original letter by Ligia Montoya in which she revealed the missing steps of the drangonfly model. Click here to see the page in English and watch the video: https://en.museodelorigami.org/videoteca-junio-2020 <https://en.museodelorigami.org/videoteca-junio-2020>
Laura Rozenberg Museo del Origami Colonia del Sacramento Uruguay
