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Bringing together these typically disparate disciplines across its native Portugal, to honour and keep them both in use and within a broader community of other artisan makers who will support, and collaborate with each other. In a conversation about the reasons as to why they started to work in such a way, Luis said something to us along the lines of: “The wood this is made of came from a tree that took about 80 years to grow, if so then the piece should last at the very least another 80 years itself, so that by the time it begins to crack another tree will have grown to take its place.” To our project, which holds an eerily similar ethos for our own work, it was deeply comforting to hear. It can be souring reminder to see that the problems we struggle with in our industry are mirrored in almost every other form of craft: That for every badly stitched polyester sweater there is a shoddily made plywood table, and for every documentary about exploitative sweatshop labour in Bengal or Haiti, there's another about entire ancient eastern-European forests felled for the sake of chairs with a ten-year life cycle. But the existence of projects like these, whether it is in our home turf of textiles, in furniture, or in hat-making, shows us that across the world, while it still may not seem like it in raw consumer data, the beautiful, the human (In its flaws and its uniqueness.) is still preferred over the abstract commodity. So just like how that sense of isolation, of being an island inside the city in the middle of the global pandemic was only an illusion of circumstance. The truth is that there are thousands of people like us out there waiting to be found. I hope we’ve sold you on them. Their work is breathtaking.
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