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Contemporary Frictions in Traditional Artesanías: Transformations and Controversies in the Making of Pomaire’s Pottery Production

par Salgado Cofré, Daniela
Président du jury Grulois, Geoffrey
Promoteur Damay, Ludivine
Co-Promoteur Levy, Victor
Publication Non publié, 2022-06-24

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

Within the framework of industrial decline in South America, some perspectives have refocused the Western narrative of professional design for industrialisation on human development and design interventions for the empowerment of crafts. These interventions, which increased after the 1990s, were based on two dichotomous paradigms: the first linked to empiric positivism and safeguarding tradition, the second focused on induced innovation through professional design to promote craft products and to mediate between local and global values. However, these discourses for the interaction of design over crafts have been contradictory and usually hierarchical, as professional design practice tends to disregard the artisan’s creative and intellectual potential that is being reduced to skilled hands.Therefore, this research explores the scaffolding of rationales and narratives about traditional crafts and the empowerment of design intervention in the Chilean context, contrasting them with the continuous design practices developed by artisans. In order to do so, I follow discourses and materials to reveal how different frictions in the social, political, technical, and economic spheres, to which artisans respond in very authentic and innovative ways, have transformed traditional crafts, and how these innovations are usually disregarded and excluded from the recognition and promotion mechanisms established by Chilean institutions.The methodology used in this research was mainly inspired by Actor-Network Theory and its potential for tracing the network of socio-technical connections that operates in crafts, taking into account interactions among discourses, materials, actors and actants and their respective agencies. Following this current, the research was deployed along three main axes: considering the examination of historical documents (written sources and objects), enquiring through interviews, and experiencing through ethnography, which also links to research methods from Design and Anthropology and their focus on exploring the relationships between producers and objects.While the historical analysis addresses the general rationales established in Chilean crafts, the interviews and ethnography focus on the pottery village of Pomaire, positioning it as a relevant case study relating to the frictions and controversies in artesanías. This village, the majority of whose inhabitants are engaged in craftmaking, is recognised as being representative of the craft heritage and of national identity. However, Pomaire has been continuously criticised for its loss of tradition and the innovations and designs developed by artisans in response to global trends, consumption, and environmental, technical, and social changes.These methods enable one to trace discursive hegemonies in crafts through selection processes based on conservative, nationalist and modern visions aligned with global discourses of progress and development. At the same time, they enabled one to observe how institutional design interventions for the commercial and aesthetic development of Pomaire have failed to achieve commercial growth. In contradistinction, artisans undertake diverse innovative strategies in consideration of the human and material agencies involved in pottery making. While these strategies are not free of conflict, they allow artisans to achieve production autonomy, recognise material and human interdependence, and continuously innovate through the means of production and their pieces, thus generating competitivity and widespread consumption.Lastly, this dissertation’s main contributions and implications relate to the characterisation of historical and contemporary associations in frictions within the craft world, based on long-standing criteria operating through ‘selective tradition’ and ‘selective innovation’, and applied via institutional definitions establishing the preference of specific cultural expressions and notions connected to heritage and modern design over others. While these notions impact the mechanisms related to the recognition, valuation, commodification, and marketisation of artisanal production, the dissertation brings to the fore forms of assimilation, adaptation, or resistance developed by artisans for embracing and contesting these discourses through their justifications and practices. In the same vein, the investigation contests modern design’s assistance, mediation and paternalistic logic over crafts and the hierarchies between designers and artisans by acknowledging other modes of innovating and designing in crafts from the artisan’s perspectives while criticising how they have been disregarded and excluded. It thus brings to the fore a critical perspective for the consideration of artisans’ ways of designing into design/craft history and theory, a perspective often omitted from the narratives that privilege more elevated, professional designs.