📕🌱The Red Book of Crafts in Andalusia states that 68% of craft trades are at risk of disappearing.
I prefer to read it this way:
the 32% who are still alive are asking us for time, a listening ear, and relief.
Not as a reassuring figure, but as a wake-up call.
Because trades don’t disappear overnight: they slowly fade away when there are no conditions for learning, for making mistakes, for staying.
A necessary book
The Red Book of Craftsmanship in Andalusia: Risk, Succession, and Future, published by Ohayō for the Regional Government of Andalusia, puts into words, data, and context a reality that many artisans are familiar with: the difficulty of ensuring the transmission of knowledge.
The book was publicly presented in Jaén and addresses key issues such as generational renewal, structural precariousness, the link with the territory, and the urgency of thinking about craftsmanship as living, contemporary knowledge.
It is not a question of preserving for the sake of preserving, but rather of creating the conditions for these trades to continue to be relevant today.
Mutur Beltz as a reference case
Mutur Beltz is featured in this publication as a benchmark for social innovation and craftsmanship, something we receive with enormous gratitude and responsibility.
Our work starts with wool, the land, and the people who live there. It starts with research, the recovery of knowledge, but also experimentation, the intersection with other languages, and the constant question of how to make a craft sustainable—in every sense of the word—today.
Being part of this book is also a way of saying that another kind of craftsmanship is possible: one that does not renounce tradition, but neither does it renounce the future.
Trades are not inherited on their own.
Trades are not passed on by inertia.
They need time.
They need conditions.
They need community.
They need someone to stay, someone to teach, someone to learn without rushing.
Continuing to weave, continuing to create, continuing to share knowledge is, for us, a form of hope.
A way of being in the world.
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