3. hand production Material culture: the material things that are produced by, and come to represent, a culture. Traditionally it has been used to describe the specifics of a culture. These photographs were taken just before Portugal and Spain joined the EU in 1992, after which there were no more sardine roasters on the street or hot chestnuts in little paper bags, no more bins of wood cutlery in the hardware stores. Late-twentieth Portugal was not wealth, the Estado Novo under Salazar, and which fell in the mid-1970s, had over-extended its resources with colonial wars in Angola and Moçambique, and what wealth there was was concentrated in a handful of corporations. Why had so many tiled house façades survived for so long? Because there had been so little re-development. Why so little re-development? Poverty and lack of outside interest other than cheap holidays on the Algarve. One finds the same phenomenon in Havana: the absence of economic development protected old colonial mansions from urban clearances, but not unfortunately from the effects of weather and age. Poverty delayed Portugal’s entry into the global market, although it was littered with the architecture, art and urbanism put in place when the country was wealthy and powerful. Thus it remained, more or less intact. Artisanal production is the level that appears to have disappeared from contemporary western culture: there is informed art, faux-naïve folk art, mad outsider art and then industrially produced things that look like art. Signs of the hand are either absent, or egocentrically particular; the serious, disinterested hand, repetitively producing products for everyday use is very much diminished. The market here for artisanally produced bowls made of telephone wire from Botswana seems to indicate that we quite like signs of hand production, we admire the skill with which things are made, and the variations within the type that come directly from the hand. These stencilled tiles are one of those products. One is very aware that a person made them while deferring to the overall pattern. The delight in making complex patterns, sorting out how to do them in stencils with a stencil’s demand that each cut out area remains surrounded by card so the stencil remains intact, the exuberant combination of geometry, flowers, ribbons, scrolls and leaves: pure decoration, pure love of pattern, great pride in the product. The installation: the tile-laying, the replacement of broken tiles over many decades, the continuity of small workshops replicating old patterns for wall repair – these are the words of a long and complex colonial narrative. /
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