The Mingei team visited Axos, a mountainous Greek village located on the northern slopes of Psiloritis Mountain, known for its history and its rich tradition. There, we had the opportunity to meet and interview Nikos Manias and Niki Koutantou, who are the owners and the inspirers of a family owned workshop of carpentry. Nikos and Niki, driven by their love for authentic products and making use of the twenty-five-year experience of Nikos, took the initiative one year ago to start the construction of wooden products that could be used every day by people. They started making a rich variety of handmade, wooden handbags, and sell them to locals and tourists.

In this video, Nikos and Niki tell about their carpentry workshop. English subtitles are available in the settings, at the bottom of the screen.

Natural materials

Based on their love for authentic products Nikos and Niki decided to design and create in their workshop handmade wooden handbags. Their main goal is to make good use of natural materials, such as wood and leather in order to construct functional artifacts for both women and men. Wood is a natural material that can be easily found in the wider area of Axos Village and can come from different kind of trees for example, olive trees, cherry trees, beech trees and oak trees. With sensitivity and desire for a controlled exploitation of natural resources, the woodworker collects wood from dried trees and processes them in a suitable way until they take shape. In this way, they do not intervene in the environment by destroying it but on the contrary, for each dry tree a new one is planted aiming to maintain the ecosystem balance. The whole idea is based on giving life to a material that is already considered dead and converting it into a useful object.

Logos

This idea is emphasized by the brand name ‘Logos’. It stems from the Greek word «Λόγος» which includes several meanings, such as thought, speech, insight, and inspiration. Furthermore, the word ‘Logos’ consists of the English word ‘log’ and the suffix –os that is the ending of the word ‘Lagos’, the place name of the area where the workshop is situated. As the owners tell, “Logos is our face in what we do. We want to show people how we can create useful objects for our daily life from a product that exists in nature and is dead.”

Construction

The woodworker collects the trunks of the trees and cuts them by using the band saw. Afterwards, the craftsman places them into a wood fired kiln in order for the humidity to be eliminated and then he cuts the wood again with the band saw to create thin sheets of wood, on which he draws the patterns and then start constructing the handbags.  A large amount of designs can be created, such as handbags, briefcases and bags for portable computers, some of which are made only from wood and others combine wood and colorful real leathers.  Besides the offered variety, every handbag can be custom made to meet your special wishes and an effort of four to five working days is required to create this final wooden unique product of high construction and aesthetics.

The video above shows a 3D reconstruction of one of the handmade handbags of Nikos Manias, made from natural materials, such as olive wood and real leather.

Revival of crafts

The construction of handmade bags gives visitors the opportunity to see up close the process of processing natural materials, such as wood from trees that thrive in the surrounding area. The revival and preservation of old traditional professions contributes to the economy of the place where they flourish, boosting trade and offering new jobs, as well as to the touristic domain.

At the same time, it allows scientists in general – and us from the Mingei project – to study the manners and customs of the area, as manifested through the objects and the process of their construction, making both tangible and intangible aspects of Heritage Culture accessible in this way.

Written by Argyro Petraki (FORTH), photography and video by Nikitas Michalakis (FORTH)

When Thibaut Nussbaumer fell from a horse in his teenage years, he had no idea at the time that it would set him on a path to becoming a distinguished member of an exciting new wave of artists working in one of the more elusive craft-making niches: glassblowing. His arm broken from the fall, Thibaut received doctor’s orders to employ his hands with some tactile tasks in the service of regaining his dexterity. As well as practising piano, one of his tasks was learning to work with clay, which instilled the spark of a love in him of working with tangible crafts. Waag’s Harry Reddick spoke to Nussbaumer, founder of glass atelier TiPii in Toulouse, about his love for crafts and the importance of passing on his knowledge and skills.

The magic of glass

After his fall from a horse, during the end of his schooling years, Nussbaumer’s class was taken to a one-week glass workshop at CIAV. This is where the spark for crafts blossomed into a more consuming passion. “We were playing little designers,” he tells. “We were making sketches, which the craftsmen realised. They were bringing our sketches to life. This was extremely exciting [to me] because I got bored with the theoretical stuff we were doing before that point. I was missing something real. And glassblowing was pretty real.”

Having reached a crossroads upon finishing his secondary education, Thibaut pursued that creation of something real in glassblowing. He signed up at CERFAV, in Vannes-le-Châtel; one of the three glassblowing educational institutions that exist in France. His four-year learning there was buttressed with a practical and theoretical internship at the Baccarat crystal factory near Nancy.

In these educational vocations, he managed to tap into a rich vein of knowledge and tradition of glass-blowing in France, which in itself is a singular strand of a much more ancient and globally-utilised craft, with evidence abounding of decorative glass from millennia past. For Thibaut, the way that this tradition has evolved and adapted to different historical and locational contexts is part of its magic.

“There are a few different aesthetic ways to work with glass. There is a Scandinavian wave, a Venetian style, and different aesthetic in the Czech Republic too. I travelled and grabbed a lot of details of how they are working, how they are using tools and how they are creating and working with their inspirations. Glassblowing is extremely playful and really sensual, with soft curves… it’s really subtle and soft.”

Learning curve

Glassblowing itself requires a furnace in order to melt glass, with which the glassblower uses a blowpipe to shape the molten glass. Thibaut spoke of some of the perceived barriers to entry into the field of glassblowing being the cost, including the cost of the furnace and the natural gas to continually heat it. However, the craft in itself can be enjoyed by people completely new to it, in much the same way as Thibaut first experienced in his youth, provided there is an expert and the materials to facilitate the process.

Past this initial entry point however, the craft requires a much more sustained and detailed approach to both learning technique and practising that dexterity. Thibaut said he wasn’t happy with what he’d made for his first five years of learning. Having put in the years working on his technical prowess, Thibaut is now able to spend more time on the ‘poetry and the soul’ inherent in the pieces rendered from the glassblowing process.

Blow It Yourself

In an attempt to bring both the romantic inspiration of glass and its technical tradition to a wider audience beyond the niche of the academic, Thibaut has founded TiPii Atelier, a glass workshop in Toulouse, together with Patricia Motte, a friend from CERFAV. One of the unusual features of the TiPii Atelier is this focus on making the craft more accessible. He even runs BIY (Blow It Yourself) sessions offering basic glassblowing lessons where their expertise helps the attendees (both children and adults) create simple blown glass items. In this way, Thibaut hopes to address the lack of knowledge about glassblowing in France, both in terms of the required resources and the methodology underpinning it, with the latter being something that teaching allowed him to personally understand on a ‘deeper level’.

“Glassblowing is extremely rare, and I felt I had to save and pass on this precious knowledge,” Thibaut explains. “This workshop at TiPii is the only one in 100 kilometers around, so my idea was to bring glasswork into an urban frame. That’s something that is really new, as small workshops involve people and help show people how it’s made. Quite a lot of people were searching to find out how to get involved in glasswork, and this is something we can now show them how to do together. There is a soul in such things, and everybody can feel it, you just have to offer them the opportunity to understand it and to see it. This is my job, to share it with as many people as I can.”

Many of the children who came along to these workshops ended up returning on a monthly basis, and have since become familiar with the names of the tools and techniques, and have ended up passing on word of their experience to other children in school or in their social life. In such a way, the same spark that encouraged Thibaut to return to the life of craft as a youth is being spread to a new generation, simultaneously returning the craft of glassblowing to the wider community.

Thibaut found that he took the art of working glass into his identity. “It is part of me, glass belongs to my life now.” Perhaps some of these children who were given their first taste of the beauty and the intricacies of glassblowing will take it with them into their life, becoming part of the world of heritage that glass represents.

Written by Harry Reddick (Waag)

Limerick Lace is an active community of local lace makers, the Limerick Museum and Archives and local educational institutions in Ireland. The community is an intriguing example of how traditional crafts are kept alive and relevant. Waag’s Dick van Dijk  spoke to Gabriela Avram, lace making enthusiast and lecturer in Digital Media and Interaction Design in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems of the university of Limerick. What can we learn from the Limerick Lace project?

Lace making

Limerick lace is a hybrid lace made on a machine made net base. It is a ‘mixed lace’ rather than a ‘true lace’, which would be entirely hand made. Though Ireland has around 7 or 8 types of lace, Limerick lace is the most famous of all Irish laces. It has been worn by thousands of women, including Queen Victoria, American First Lady Edith Roosevelt and Countess Markievicz.

Limerick lace comes in two forms:
• tambour lace, that is made by stretching a net over a frame like a tambourine and drawing threads through it with a hook;
• needlerun lace, which is made by using a needle to embroider on a net background.

As the holes of the net (called gaskets) on which you create the pattern are very small, making lace is not only about carefully looking, but it relies on muscle mind and practice as well. There are 47 distinct stitches in Limerick Lace. The first steps of lace making are explained here.

Made in Limerick

The recent revival of lace making started in 2014 when Limerick was cultural capital of Ireland and several ‘Made in Limerick’ projects were funded by the Irish government, Limerick Lace being one of them. Its main objectives were to design and create an exhibition of Limerick Lace for the Limerick Museum, and to produce a book on the history of Limerick Lace.

The Limerick Museum and Archives host a valuable collection of local lace, partly ecclesiastic, partly domestic (dollies, aprons, christening robes). But before 2014, there were only two cabinets in the museum displaying lace.

One of the locals who got involved in the Limerick Lace project is Gabriela Avram. She joined the project out of personal interest in civic engagement and the potential link with modern technologies, such as augmenting lace with digital technology and creating digital tools to support lace makers.

Gabriela Avram was commissioned to build an interactive installation for the 2014 exhibition, Amazing Lace. Together with interaction design master student Suzanna Melinn and the local community they co-designed the installation Enlaced, consisting of an artificial leather laser cut front dress on a mannequin, augmented with lace pieces contributed by various local community members mounted on the sleeves, including NFC tags allowing the visitors to identify each maker.

Additionally, the exhibition presented instructions for visitors on how to make lace and try lace making out themselves. Later on, a Limerick Lace starter kit was constructed and made available through Etsy. It is hard for novices to get access to the materials needed, so the kit is an important step in making the craft more accessible.

Friends of Lace

In the years that followed, the activities to revive the lace community continued. The Limerick Lace project encouraged locals to bring out their own lace pieces to show and discuss, in a series of events titled Bring Out Your Lace. In the local Fablab, several local artists and makers started experimenting with lace making through other means than textiles, such as paper, 3D printers and laser cutters.

In 2016, Limerick Museum and Archives, in collaboration with the Limerick School of Art and Design organised a festival titled Hybrid: the identity of liminal lace, addressing the role of lace and its social-economic history. The festival included several exhibitions and lace-making workshops, as well as a conference.

The Florence Vere O’Brien lace drawing competition, initiated in 2015, invited art students to come up with new designs for Limerick lace, and the submissions went beyond any expectations, encouraging a potential move away from the dominant, traditional motives of flowers towards streetscapes and everyday objects.

A local group of lace enthusiasts formed in 2017 and became known as the Friends of Lace. They became more structurally involved to help to conserve and preserve artefacts, for example by repacking the lace in storage at the Museum following strict conservation rules, catalogue lace items, create teaching resources and support novel interpretations and uses of Limerick lace.
The revival made them visible as an active community group, which led to other groups following their example. In July 2019, Limerick lace was added to the National Inventory of Intangible Heritage.

Embracing new possibilities

Gabriela sees her role as attempting to bridge a gap between a valued traditional craft, and the opportunities offered by modern digital technologies for its preservation, documentation, further development and outreach.

One of Gabriela’s findings in liaising with art students is that new audiences lack dexterity, they don’t know how to use the needle – as they are mostly used to keyboard and mouse. In learning the craft trying things out is necessary, including the nuisance of undoing what you have already created, and starting over.

By now, the community’s activities also target tourism, through information leaflets in hotels, workshops for tourists, which especially receive high interest from American tourists. Apart from their own website and social media channels, the Friends of Lace are working towards an all Irish laces website, dreaming of a Limerick lace study centre (modelled after the one in Sydney) and potentially a free online lace images repository, created and edited by volunteers around the world.

Gabriela Avram is Lecturer in Digital Media and Interaction Design in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems of the University of Limerick, Ireland, and a senior member of the Interaction Design Centre. Her current research focuses on sustainable urban development, collaborative economy and the role of technology in supporting civic engagement of local communities.

Written by Dick van Dijk from Waag

References

The artist Eirini Linardaki creates artworks using a variety of textiles coming from many places throughout the world. Each of these pieces carries its own story and at the same time, reveals the history, the way of thinking and the experiences of people who used it, in simple words what we now call cultural heritage. Although, the interesting fact is that the cultural heritage is captured and presented as a form of art and entertainment, and is made accessible to everyone.

The team of  FORTH ( Xenophon, Nikos, and Ilia) had the opportunity to meet Eirini Linardaki on their flight to Paris in anticipation of the plenary meeting of Mingei Project, where due to the strikes that were going on at that time, they shared a cab and had the time to talk about her work. The artist informed them about the exhibition that she was commissioned to do in Heraklion, Greece, in continuation of her project in NYC and Paris. Afterwards, when the exhibition was installed, they visited it and had an interview with her. It is also worth mentioning that our team met the artist at her atelier, where in the framework of an interview, they had the opportunity to discuss about the way she creates her artworks, the source of her inspiration, and the importance of children’s participation in her projects.

The artist

Eirini Linardaki was born in Athens and studied art in France, where she lives for two decades. She lives and works in France, in the United States, and on the island of Crete. The artist deliberately creates happy images and colorful “bursts” of enjoyment and energy with children sharing their daily lives, since she thinks that childhood is the place from where all we come.

She created public art in New York, Paris, Athens and Heraklion and she was commissioned for several public art installations by the NYC Mayor’s office for climate change, the NYC Parks and the NYC DOT. Her public installations are currently on view in Heraklion, Athens, Newark, NJ, Queens, and Brooklyn, NY. She often works in collaboration with communities and schools to develop her installations. In her latest body of works she uses archival material and Wikileaks footage in order to incorporate conflict imagery in her discourse.

The inspiration of the artist’s project

Eirini Linardaki creates artworks using an innovative method mainly based on her childhood experience. When she was a child, she used to look at the patterns of the mosaic floor and see different shapes, such as pirate ships, battles, people and so on. The next time that she went back to the same place, she looked for the same objects but she couldn’t find them. Growing up, she left the house, but she still kept those memories of the shapes in the mosaic. Many people do exactly the same with the clouds, they observe them and can see different shapes that are not been seen by anyone else.

Eirini Linardaki, as an artist and an adult, tried to find a way to create a project that allows people to perceive who they are, which their cultural heritage is, where they come from, how they can see things, and that all these traits are interrelated. In 2019, in the framework of her project she did many workshops around the world and brought many different fabrics. Then, these colorful fabrics are cut and stuck, making magnetic shapes that will be used to create collages on large surfaces. The pieces of the fabrics come from different people and places throughout the world. Some of them originate from countries at war, such as Liberia in Africa and others from Crete, Japan, and so on. Each of these pieces carries its own story and captures the cultural heritage of a country presenting it as a form of art and entertainment.

Eirini Linardaki speaks about her art

This entire idea is based on the artist’s view that the things we see depend on where we come from and all of us come from our childhood. In that way, the project allows people to interact and change what they see, making their own artwork in the museum. Due to the fact that children perceive things differently than adults, every time they look at the project, they see different figures, like a rabbit running, a dinosaur and so on. Then, follows a discussion about what each of them sees. The topics are mainly inspired from pictures that represent physical phenomena like volcanic explosions, fires, clouds, sea waves, etc.

The artist speaks about the source of her inspiration. The video is also available with English subtitles

Other exhibitions of Eirini Linardaki

Eirini Linardaki has exhibited in Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Onassis Cultural Center, Athens, Greece; Salon de Montrouge, Paris; Fri-Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg, Switzerland; Natural History Museum, Geneva, Switzerland; Macedonian Contemporary Art Museum, Greece; Hamburg Kunsthaus, Germany, Rutgers University, New Jersey, Institut Français d’Athènes, Greece, Greek Consulate, New York, John Jay College for Criminal Justice, New York, etc.

Written by Argyro Petraki (FORTH), photography and video by Thodoris Evdaimon (FORTH)

References