From becoming craft to becoming heritage: Transformations in craft production and value in Artecampo Museum

Abstract (English)

How do crafts change in the process of becoming heritage, and what do these modifications say about the logics of value and the social identities that shift material culture into craft and then as heritage? By analysing Artecampo, a Bolivian crafts initiative which opened a museum in 2017, I will present the transformation of artefacts as new social actors participate in producing new meanings and creating value.

Artecampo began in the 1980s in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. It is made up of 14 groups of artisans who, in their majority, live in rural communities of Santa Cruz, Tarija and Chuquisaca. Some belong to Indigenous communities, such as Guarani, Guarayo and Ayoreo, some do not identify or organise as such. 95% of Artecampo artisans are women. The initial goal of this social initiative was to improve the quality of life of marginalised and vulnerable members of society, and Artecampo prides itself in being an ethical commercial endeavour from the production to the commercialisation of crafts. In addition, with few exceptions, the production of crafts originates in existing Indigenous or popular practices of the artisan communities. Some of which were in the process of disappearing. Therefore, there has not only been a commercial component to craft production, but also an aesthetic and cultural preservation component that foresaw the creation of a museum that exhibits crafts and contextualises their modes of production.

In this paper, I will analyse a selection of Artecampo crafts as they make their way from artefacts of material culture to commercialised products, to finally becoming museum objects, and compare each with their ‘reverse’, that is, the artefacts that end up being excluded from these processes. Thus, I aim to present the different actors and conditions which influence the material production of crafts and how they justify their preservation. I will also reflect on the influence the crafts have on these social actors, who in turn adapt their logics, taxonomies and processes to respond to the dynamic materiality of Artecampo craft production. I will analyse these material, conceptual and relational transformations, not as linear and consecutive sequences but within multi-layered, competing and, at times, conflicting logics. By introducing museum-making in the development of Indigenous and popular crafts, I will also argue that museum practice is not only based on expertise, but also on the purposes and circumstances that brings it to existence in the first place.