The project follows a 4 Rs strategy to create a practice revitalisation process in the gentlest and most sustainable manner.
Research
- Mapping what is remembered and what is being forgotten, in technique, form and material.
- Understanding the factors contributing to active deskilling through contact with modern life.
Remember
Revitalising a tradition means remembering craft practices together and creating visibility for them within the community. Storytelling and gathering family histories as context-making exercises make reviving the memory of crafting robust and interesting.
Revive
Reviving a fading tradition actually requires reviving a relationship with latent skill sets, community held repositories of knowledge, of the value of makers and craftspeople as keepers of memory, history, and identity.
Goh-Bugun workshops followed three pedagogical principles.
Our Guiding Principles
- Revive value of local teachers
- Start with known techniques, tools and motifs
- Let the community set the pace
Reconnect
Craft is not merely a livelihood skill, it is a meaningful network of knowledge, skill, material and social relationships. The stronger the existing network the better is the capability of the community to adapt. The Goh-Bugun project reconnects the community
- with traditional knowledge through a network of makers across Bugun villages
- with the outside world through craft as their cultural identity
- with local materials, geography, and the floral bio diversity