Story
Co-Obradoiro Galego or “Collaborative Galician Creation Space” is a collaborative project between three basketmakers and a biodesigner looking at biotechniques to help regenerate and revive our Galician craft heritage.
The decline of the Galician basketry craft has worsened in recent years, due to the manufacturing of fishing tools moving away from traditional fishing crafts. Fishing tools that, in their origin, were made by local basket makers with wicker or wood but today are made mainly from plastic by large foreign industries. Specifically, this situation has intensified because of the reforestation of non-autochthonous species whose wood cannot be used for basketry, and the disappearance of rural life.
Consequently, our objective is to produce a flexible and biodegradable biomaterial that can take shape by local basketmakers. Chitosan is an organic and non-toxic biopolymer that when degraded in soil, acts as a fertilizer and fungicides and helps nutrients absorption. Through using a lactic acid fermentation process - that requires a whey solution from the seafood shells - it is possible to obtain their natural pigments and their chitosan.
The biomaterial takes form thanks to an extrusion biotechnique, generating zero waste and encouraging the development of techniques relevant for a contemporary lifestyle. We are using traditional hand weaving crafts with vegetable fibers are applied simultaneously alongside new extrusion biotechniques. In this way, we are challenging techniques and crafts producing a regional design at the level of our time, relating the local with the global, establishing links between culture and community.
While the design outcomes aim to reinterpret existing components present in the Galician culture. First, a well-known Galician symbol, the scallop shell, translated into a basketry weaving technique, weaving the biomaterial from the king and ox crab. Second, a wooden fishing trap skeleton with a visible net in the extruded biomaterial. Thirdly, a reinterpretation of a typical Galician basket for carrying fish on the head, called patella, mixed with the traditional Galician hat, again, weaving the biomaterial from the king and ox crab. Finally, a design that celebrates basketry as the first craft because of its original use as a method of food preservation applying the biomaterial in a flat extrusion process.
Lastly, Co-Obradoiro Galego is a project based on a local community that uses crafts to show a specific language from the Galician culture, while bio-techniques as a tool that speaks about history, tradition, and culture applying a closed-loop system.
