How has craft been represented through a variety of media? What impact does representation through the particularities of images, films, spoken and written words, digital platforms have on how craft is practiced and understood? To what extent do representations focus upon materials, tools, practices, makers, environments? How has the dialogue between craft and representation informed the transmission of craft skills? How has the mediation of craft informed its status within debates about heritage and identity? In what ways might translation across particular modalities of communication resonate distinctly locally, transnationally, globally? How has the representation of craft been mobilised to generate or to problematise consumption?

This series features speakers worldwide and across the widest possible range of disciplines and career stages who are thinking critically about intersections between craft and representation. 10-minute presentations in English illustrated by a single PowerPoint slide will generate a dialogue amongst all participants. These dialogues will be ‘live’ via Zoom on alternate Thursdays at 19.30 hrs GMT from 20 January - 31 March 2022. Please visit our listings page for the full programme here.

This week's session is themed DISARMING CRAFT

Access event via ZOOM: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85174602566

Chinnappa BG - Weapons of Honour: Colonial Disarming Laws, Kodava Modernity and the Restructuring of Artisan Economy in Kodagu

Odi Katti, a broad bladed knife and Piche Katti, a sheathed dagger are traditionally worn by men among Kodavas, an ethno-linguistic minority community from Kodagu in the south Indian state of Karnataka. These weapons played an integral role in the life cycle rituals of the Kodavas and were used to commemorate martial valour under the King of Kodagu. Historically these weapons were made by the Airis, an artisan community engaging in various crafts such as blacksmithery, carpentry, jewellery and gun making. The annexation of Kodagu and the exiling of the King in 1834 lead to changes in the regional governance impacting social cultural roles established by the erstwhile rulers. The research aims to survey the impact of the colonial administrative interventions by locating it in the changing symbolism of arms and the position of the artisan community.

The peasant uprisings around Kodagu and Malabar regions of south India from the mid nineteenth century resulted in special legislations to disarm communities in the provinces under British control. These legislations imposed restrictions on the production of weapons in the region and its possession. The Kodavas were granted exemption from the Disarming Act by the British East India Company and later the British India government, in return for their armed support to quell these uprisings. The continued use of arms through the nineteenth and twentieth century among the Kodavas takes on a symbolic ceremonial significance of retained honour framed within the constructed British ethnographic narrative of a noble martial race. The movement of the weapons from the artillery to symbolic ceremonial presentation epitomises the conception of colonial modernity among the Kodavas. The research argues that the resulting changes in arms wielding concretised an agrarian subjecthood marginalising the diverse artisan economy of the Airis. The study surveys colonial legislations, sartorial and photographic instances of conception of colonial Kodava identity within the multifaceted configuration of market-state economy restructuring artisan economies of weapons.

Chinnappa B. G. is a researcher working on politics of identity and history within the Kodava ethnolinguistic minority context. His interests lie in the interdisciplinary areas of cultural history, material culture and cultural studies. His ongoing research focuses on documenting colonial Kodava houses (1834-1947) and their histories. He is currently a guest faculty at the Department of Postgraduate Studies and Research in English, Mangalore University, Field Marshal K. M. Cariappa College, Madikeri, Kodagu.

Hampton Smith - Representing Enslaved Labor in the American Index of Design

Throughout the 1930s, Al Curry captured the design work of colonial New Orleans in stunning detail. Of the eighty-five works he documented for the American Index of Design, over half illustrate objects made exclusively of iron. Page upon page of unfurling forms illustrate the “iron lace” now endemic to the city—each object indexed as a stand-alone work upon a stark background, flattened and abstracted like botanical illustrations.

Though ultimately unacknowledged in the final images, Curry was documenting work created by Black craftspeople. As historians have acknowledged since the 1930s, it was primarily enslaved individuals, possessing a uniquely creolized knowledge of blacksmithing, that were forced to wrought both whimsy gates as well as utilitarian, even violent iron objects. Curry’s Slave Collar, shown in profile and aerial points of view, diagrams how iron’s capacity to restrain the body and produce a spectacle from punishment cohered in forms not unlike decorative wrought iron.

When seen from this perspective, Curry’s images of ironwork provide an opportunity to confront the illogic constantly faced by Black craftspeople: on one hand, these designs profess to the skilled artisanry and creative play wrought iron made available to enslaved ironworkers, and, on the other, images like Slave Collar illustrate the excruciating obstacle of having to craft objects made to further enslave and dispossess.

Curry’s images therefore speak to the intersection of history of design and the history of slavery, and, in particular, the problematics associated with representing the craft of enslaved individuals who skillfully navigated the many permutations of iron during Slavery’s empire. Due to archival limitations, we are often left incapable of knowing exactly what enslaved people thought about their work. Yet, I suggest these twentieth-century images of nineteenth-century objects provide the opportunity to understand the skill, embodied processes, and meaning black craftspeople found in wrought ironwork.

Hampton Smith(they/them, he/his) is pursuing their doctoral studies in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their forthcoming dissertation, Making Slavery, is the first intellectual history of Black craftspeople in the eighteenth and nineteenth century transatlantic worlds.

Daniela Salgado Cofré - Cema-Chile’s Political Imaginaries in Artesanías

This contribution questions the representation of typical crafts in Chile after the coup d’état of 1973, which radically impacted the idea of collective identity and popular autonomy promoted by the government of Salvador Allende towards a static, nationalist and reductionist approach promoted by the dictatorship of Pinochet and applied through Cema-Chile.

During this period of seventeen years, Cema-Chile, under its objective of ‘achieving the integral development of the Chilean became the central organism promoting and supporting the production of artesanías, setting a specific vision of typicity and national identity backed by the military government. This organism, directed by the first lady Lucía Hiriart was the continuation of the Centros de Madres or Mother’s Centers, created during the ‘30s and existing as organised state institutions formally unified as CEMA in 1952, becoming a tool for political promotion during the dictatorship. One of the instruments for disseminating the Chilean women’s values was the Cema-Chile magazine, published and circulating among all the ‘Mother’s Centres’ since 1977. This publication —between recipes, crafts projects, advertising, and historical articles— spread messages for subjugating and oppressing women in correspondence to the ideologies of the dictatorial regime.

Therefore, this contribution aims to examine representations of craftswomen created by Cema-Chile through its magazine and explore how the objects and images of traditional crafts were used for ideological purposes during this period. By exploiting crafts as a naïve production of the peasant world, which portrayed the power relations between the conservative and the popular classes through artesanías and other manifestations within the cultural sphere, the magazine endorsed different images that perpetuated landlord and peasants imaginaries as the national symbols of Chilenidad.

Daniela Salgado Cofré is an industrial designer and assistant professor at the School of Architecture and Design of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. As a doctoral candidate working in the Sasha Laboratory (Architecture and Human Sciences) of the Faculty of Architecture of the Université libre de Bruxelles, her research focuses on critical crafts and on questioning modern and contemporary design perspectives by following controversies and transformation of artesanías and design in the Chilean context. Within the Valparaíso School, Daniela has conducted various situated investigations and pedagogical design experiences at the Travesías de Amereida and Ciudad Abierta. She has also participated in diverse international exhibitions, workshops, and seminars.