Craftsmanship, Community, Design
The largest furniture industry in Japan has inaugurated, with Enzo Mari, a program called “Un milione di alberi di Sugi – One million Sugi trees”, a type of wood that grows widely and easily in Japan, used to re-propose furniture of the Japanese rural tradition. Alessi promotes Twergi series, small objects for the kitchen and table, manufactured by communities of craftsmen from some of the Alpine valleys in Piedmont and distributed with success worldwide. These examples, chosen among so many, stress the importance of the bond between industry and craftsmanship, tradition and local materials.
In this direction, in our Region we have attempted to work not with individual craftsmen but with a number of communities. We have established networks for knowledge and promotion, provided technological and business assistance to the enterprises. Rather than closed projects, because we know how much craftsmen value their independence, we provided “guidelines”, open to freedom of interpretation of the craft community in respect of certain shared rules. We have defined sustainable protocols for production, and outlined scenarios of consumption that configure products not exclusively for connoisseurs or nostalgics, but for everyone is able to appreciate quality. The territory, in this sense, becomes the first client of the typical craft product: the bars and restaurants, the offices of the institutional communities, the shops selling typical products like foods, are filled with new products, becoming the site of the promotion.
For this reason, “Artigianato Comunità Design” is the subtitle of the exhibition entitled MANUfatto that, if you come to Turin for the conference, we can visit together in the splendid framework of a historic but out-of-the-way location that, like typical craftsmanship, has the same problems of visibility, communication and survival.
Welcome!
