Abstract
The rediscovery of traditional production processes and the showcasing and promotion of the culture-intensive artisanry of a specific social community, leading to a profoundly different viewpoint on the global v. local dichotomy. Geographical identities lose their uniqueness, acquiring instead a pluralistic, hybrid character built on paradigms of convergence and intermixing of streams of relations that reconstitute the interactions among places, cultures, communities, people, habits, rituals and iconographies. While the local transforms into cosmopolitan specialty to increase its market appeal by leveraging the allure of the different and exotic, the global undergoes a process of indigenization of new cultural forms, thus acquiring new formal values. This is a process of cultural transition, which, via culture, connects social meanings through an innovative reinterpretation of processes that combine the richness of the time-honored, distinctive techniques proper to a given culture with the new expressive idioms of the contemporary world to develop products and services that leverage differentiation and personalization as a means of reinvigorating a culture of design. The reservoirs of material culture and artisanal techniques typical of a specific community and its territory become more than just a heritage but also cultural capital. The paper considers, through the analysis of different case studies, the particular legacy with the culture of a territory leads to a vision that sees contemporary techniques become effective narratives with explicit, functional, and descriptive content, but also with implicit, emotional content that evokes other meanings, i.e. they assume symbolic values of a social and cultural nature.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Craft, Material Culture, Cultural Capital, Authentic Production, Cultural Transition, Resilience
