Convention versus contemporaneity: the affordances of design-led mediation towards sustaining an ancestral cycle of linen making in Castelões, Portugal

Abstract

This article discusses the emerging affordances of a research-led mediation process that is currently being developed in Castelões, a parish in the Viseu region of Central Portugal. The mediation, a part of an ongoing doctoral project in Design, focuses on creating a semantic framework for the resignification of the term "innovation", specifically in contexts of traditional making. Its objective is not to break with the past, but to extend its interpretation as a leverage for generating contemporarily relevant value and meaning -in this case, in and with vulnerable communities of practice.The practice, popularly referred to as a "from seed to towel" production cycle is an ancient tradition kept alive in Castelões, which covers more than twenty manual stages of linen-making -from planting flax seeds to weaving fabric on handlooms. A distinguishing feature here is that unlike in other linen making cultures, the practitioners of Castelões are typically cognizant of, and adept in, each stage of the production cycle. This specialized knowhow is unique and has been passed through generations of predominantly women practitioners. Linen production once prevailed throughout the Portuguese territory, especially in the northern and central regions, however, in recent years, it has drastically declined due to a variety of unmitigated local and global factors, leaving Castelões as one of the few -if barely -remaining centres where artisanal linen-making is still in practice and can still be observed empirically.The urgency for a multi-agent approach to mediation within this context is underlined by the fact that the practice base is critically low: four practitioners, each of an advanced age, who embody the knowledge of the process in its entirety, and are, therefore, both principal protagonists and veritable assets for restorative intervention. The study, therefore, finds further thematic alignment with the conference track's emphasis on care, wherein equal emphasis is laid on intangible human and social facets of heritage preservation as processual or material ones.