Tecendo as tramas da história pelos fios da memória: lugares de memória e ferramentas a tiracolo

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to develop an autobiographical narrative that places the author as a testimony of his own time, bringing elements of their formative processes and acting as an artisan. To develop this objective, the question that leads this research is: How can this autobiographical narrative give visibility to the artisan profession in the sense of contextualizing and questioning its policies, training contexts, performance and positions? After readings from references of the autobiography genre, such as Nora (1993), Pollak (1989), Caligaris (1998), Montenegro (2018) and other authors, set out to undertake the journey of writing about memories, places and tools that were present in their professions, structuring the skills of the artisan and the need to understand how handicrafts can be an instrument of service, exploitation and opportunism, but also of independence and identity formation. The narrative seeks to show how the passage through childhood and the first contacts with handicrafts shaped their expectations for art, and in the age of majority he decided decided to assume the profession, seeking to understand its contradictions and seeking answers to the questions that arose along its trajectory. As i reminisce about this path, walked through places places and places, some physical, others in the recesses of memories, awake in the exercise of remembering. Realizing that craftsmanship has, in addition to its financial and aesthetic value, its value as a culture, transcends any simplistic understanding. There is identity, belonging, ancestry and a lot of contradictions. I also try to highlight the political aspects of my training as a craftsman, such as participation in some entities of the category, which did not resist the confrontation of handicrafts as a culture and succumbed to oblivion or in the paternalistic and hideous domain. Searching for answers led the author to back to studying after four decades. I saw in education the possibility of scientifically understanding what makes a community lose its cultural potential through the strategic impositions of the market. In the academy, I could understand that what I witnessed and sensed in this sector was an extremely unfair and individual dispute field. The COVID-19 pandemic and its damaging consequences resulting from the government's lack of preparãtion to face has caused harmful situations that reached beyond the population's health, their subsistence conditions. In such a time, art, despite being a balm in these dark hours, its maker lives the contradictions of, when he most needs art to survive, he hears common sense throwing the phrase: "You don't eat art". And the official bodies chancellor this, causing a real dismantling in the culture, not honoring notices and creating artisans to decorate their agendas. The pandemic has come and unveiled a dirty world in its human decisions. Unfortunately our country is leading this way.