The book of the Ancestral Techniques Project, Current Solutions (TASA) was released on August 20th in the middle of Fatacil, bringing with it the confirmation of its success and the concern that the future is open and that it will not be easy to create the sustainability that he deserves.
TASA is a project launched by CCDR Algarve and which allowed a team of Designers to work together with artisans in the Algarve in the rehabilitation of handicrafts, aiming to revitalize a sector doomed to abandonment and also aiming, with this, to build a commercial perspective.
It's not every day that you see an investment of this nature in the reinvigoration of a craft lost from the identity of an Algarve society that got used to looking at tourism and other cultures, selling banal artifacts and often forgetting the raw material that the artisans they have always esteemed and the teachings that urgently need to be preserved and passed on to future generations.
Furthermore, there is a process – product-confection-cultural status – that was very present in the 1st phase of the project and another that will still have a long way to go and that includes the relationship of the product with the craft economy and the market logic . The sustainability of TASA's Algarve handicrafts will hardly succeed if the 2nd phase, which is now beginning, is not given special attention to the factors that constitute the success of the 1st and which highlights the “horizontality” which seems to me to be its greatest virtue!
The success of the TASA project, as mentioned in the text by The Home Project Gbr to whom the content of this initiative is much owed, it derives from a work that knew how to involve all agents on an equal footing, causing the horizontal effect that gave rise to the principle of what could be understood as a true network. A work network that was generated, and with it, many professional and social synergies that it is important to value.
The project allows us to foresee this potentiality of joining knowledge, of communicating in different areas with direct discourse and efficient mediation, capable of joining the medronho business with pottery or cork with ceramics, at the same time enhancing the knowledge of both the artisans.
Since the presentation of TASA, which took place last year in Faro, it struck me that, regardless of the commercial status that these pieces may have, there is a human potential for valuing the intangible heritage that makes us dream and believe that it is possible to give this activity a new direction. This success is essentially due to dialogue and it is this that must prevail from beginning to end of this investment.
What I was able to confirm in the presentation of the book was the elevation of all these unique characteristics and realize how Design combined with collective intelligence has brought us a careful document, with commendable graphics and documentation work that leaves us with an important contribution to the knowledge born. the relationship between craft creation and scientific production.
Despite all the success achieved, the way in which the book was presented (in a Fatacil that does little to aggrandize it and without the presence of most of its actors) symptomatic of the existence of profound changes in the careful communication strategy that these objects had during your childbirth.
It is important that we think that the launch of this book, as well as the public and institutional presentations of the objects, will only have to gain if they bring rigor, design and community involvement as a differentiating factor, which is why we also question that this publication It will only make sense if the agents involved and documented feel that the book is theirs, that it belongs to them as a legacy of a work that has just begun and that values us, Algarveans too!.
Author Jorge Rocha is an independent artist and producer
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