Goh Bugun is shaped by a ‘4-R’ process, aiming to create a practice revitalisation process in the gentlest and most sustainable manner.
For Goh Bugun, research entails:
Mapping what is remembered and what is being forgotten, in technique, form and material.
Understanding the factors contributing to active deskilling through contact with modern life.
Through craft-walks in villages, impromptu exhibitions and many conversations and interviews, the 4Rs strategy was initiated.
Revitalising a tradition means remembering craft practices together and creating visibility for them within the community. Storytelling and gathering family histories as context-making exercises make reviving the memory of crafting robust and interesting.
Reviving a fading tradition actually requires reviving a relationship with latent skill sets, community held repositories of knowledge, of the value of makers and craftspeople as keepers of memory, history, and identity.
Goh-Bugun workshops followed three pedagogical principles.
Our Guiding Principles
Revive value of local teachers
Start with known techniques, tools and motifs
Let the community set the pace
Craft is not merely a livelihood skill, it is a meaningful network of knowledge, skill, material and social relationships. The stronger the existing network the better is the capability of the community to adapt. The Goh-Bugun project reconnects the community:
with traditional knowledge through a network of makers across Bugun villages
with the outside world through craft as their cultural identity
with local materials, geography, and the floral bio diversity
