Tomorrow’s Tradition. Everyday Innovations

In 2002 Danish Crafts organized the exhibition Tomorrow’s tradition – Everyday Innovations at La Fondation Danoise in Paris. This exhibition, which was developed in co-operation with Curator Jobim Jochimsen was intended to highlight crafts as a purveyor of culture in everyday life.

Craft exists as a kind of interface in the space between industrial design and the more autonomous field of visual arts, functioning in between objective everyday life and the meta-level of thoughts and ideas. Metaphorically, these objects contribute to a diverse interpretation of human being, sensing and consciousness in everyday life.

Through this cultural function, crafts have the power to shape contesting, questioning and thought-provoking ideas aimed at the future. Free from the production-related demands of industrial design, crafts can use their ethically and aesthetically reflective manifestations to highlight human needs and options.

In this way crafts also represent innovation in everyday life.

While a few decades ago, crafts often represented the polar opposite of industrialized, urban, modernity; they are now cutting-edge. Using the newest technology, crafts explore clever material designs while enjoying the advantage of having no fixed identity. No longer are the inherent characteristics of materials being explored, but rather the creation and utilization of materials in significant interchanges between form, images and tactile qualities.

Under the influence of international tendencies and in opposition to old, national traditions, crafts begin to create an identity in their own right. Not only do they purvey culture, they create cultural forms both for the present and for the future.

Photo: Astrid Krogh