Made In seminar #1: Good practices and Potentials – “Living Craft”
The seminar was organised from October 26th to 28th in Sirogojno, at the only outdoor museum in Serbia.
26 Oct
Date
Friday, 26. oct
Lecturer
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Time
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Program Language
English
Location
Entrance
Closed event
About the lecture
Crafts are at the base of what Sirogojno represents, where you can see a reenactment of a traditional Balkan settlement from centuries back, deeply rooted in the everyday habits and activities, that actually revolved around craftsmen and their skills, as entire villages depended on their production of utility artefacts, tools and everyday objects.
This sort of experience and a temporary relocation offered all of the seminar participants ( among whom have been all of the representatives from the partner organizations of the project as well as two experts from Sweden Emelie Röndahl and Anna Gudmundsdottir) a chance to reflect on the ancient role of crafts in society and local communities, and meet the local ethnographers and researchers who are dealing with crafts as heritage. The program featured extensive guided tour of the entire museum, interviews and encounters with its curators, and exchanges between the participants.
The main questions of the seminar were: How to deal with crafts beyond the context of heritage and national identity?; What are the crafts of today, in relation to the contemporary lifestyles and everyday habits?; Is there such thing as “digital craft”?; Are there sustainability models for traditional crafts beyond tourism and souvenir artefacts?
Made in is a research, design and heritage initiative that encourages collaboration and knowledge exchange between traditional craftsmen and contemporary designers. The aim of the project is to, on one hand revitalize crafts tradition and on the other hand to educate designers about material and immaterial heritage, thus creating new, authentic and more sustainable value of contemporary design.
In the end, the attention was dedicated to the following question: How can the Made In network address this issues in a proactive way and offer some potential solutions, experiments and open the door to a new understanding of how to deal with crafts, and how to reinvent their role in the society?