Crafts: sensitive art from the margins

In Latin America, numerous artisans, members of communities that resist, guard environmental and symbolic knowledge. They reproduce practices of care and use of plant or animal fibers, dyes, clay, metals, stones, designs, color palettes, they connect with their ancestors, ask permission from spiritual owners, and recreate delicate techniques and meanings that surprise and question the canons that establish the art world. To do so, they confront not only all kinds of difficulties, discriminations and limitations of access in the territory in which they produce and which they represent, but they often face anonymity and naturalized invisibility, even once the work has won the gaze and applause of the general public in museums or in fashion.

None of the colonial categorical grids has managed to grasp its complexity: its slow and transgenerational time; its human, non-human and more-than-human nature; its simultaneous specific location and general impact; its complex techniques and morphologies; its resilience; its political transcendence.

In the prestigious (and commercialized) field of art, crafts have always occupied a subordinate place. They have been historically undervalued: for being the art of the peasantry, for the primacy of their material aspect, for forming goods for use, for not prioritizing exceptional authorship, for being linked to traditional ways of life that are in delicate processes of retraction or vulnerability in the face of the (post)modern, for the relevance of indigenous communities among their makers. Although it comes from the margins (far from the epicenters of the canon), with its different names: traditional folkloric or projection crafts, popular arts, ethnic art, indigenous art, crafts resist in all territories, linking particular ways of living, celebrating, commemorating and making present fragile lines of life that involve a multiplicity of companion beings and agencies.

On the other hand, in the history of design, craftsmanship appears overlapped, but it has gained relevance in recent years as part of a productive chain that seeks objects from the earth and new ways of doing things as a disciplinary guide. A turning point in the understanding of popular art is the work of Ticio Escobar in the 80s, who, even before the rise of decolonial studies, revised the categories of Eurocentric modernity to push the boundaries of what we consider art or culture, from his own perspectives. This proposal not only configures a political agenda for the revaluation of historically minority populations, but also opens the discussion on the symbolic tools of everyday representation of hitherto unknown worlds. Proposal Guided by the hypothesis that crafts operate and dispute their meanings in several simultaneous ontological regimes, and taking into account the debates around the place of crafts in the world of art and design, this dossier is proposed as a space for reflection on crafts, artisans, and artisanal trades. In this issue of the Memorias Disidentes Magazine we call for works (articles, poetics, essays or productions from the field of art or design) that mobilize from different perspectives and question one of the multiple dimensions of artisanal making. Reflecting on artisanal making also implies a political mobilization that seeks to contribute to the recomposition of the dominant order, decidedly violent, unequal and hierarchical. We are interested in thinking about how artisanal making, from an ‘other’ position, stresses extractivisms, patrimonialization, marketing, and challenges the canons of power from silent and daily manual labor.

Some of the proposed lines are:

-Crafts in the world, in Latin America, in Argentina. Canons and assessment devices (registrations, certifications, competitions, fairs). -The artisanal making of communities -Crafts and the environment -(Disputes around) legislation and regulations around crafts. -The definition of crafts as a field. Indigenous crafts, popular arts, folkloric arts. -What endures and what is lost. Intergenerational transmission. Dynamics, exchanges, migrations, displacements. -Colonial grids (ontological and epistemic conquest) around traditional crafts. What escapes us or cannot be pigeonholed. -Access to raw materials. Mediation, threads of life, precariousness / abundance. -Reaching the museum. The trousseaus. Archaeological appropriation/restitution. -Marketing at its different scales. Culture as a resource. -Crafts, innovation and design. -Iconography, symbology. Practices of secrecy (secrets). -Processes of patrimonialization of (im)material culture. -Authorship, the individual/community, collaboration, invisibility of the maker(s), appropriation, community property. -Links, the social framework beyond people, ancestors, environment. -Extreme otherness (categorical grids, absences, invisibilizations). What has no place. -The imaginary dimension. What is not expected. -“We were never modern”. Techniques and technologies. -Women's art. Crafts and feminisms.