Do traje tradicional à joalharia contemporânea

Objective

The corpus of this research aims to study the women’s costume of the archipelagos of the Azores, Madeira and Corsica. The object of study – the insular regional costume – leads us to a jewellery creation materialised through a matrix of contemporary visual grammar.

To this end, we set out to achieve the following work objectives:

1.  Determine the bibliographic framework arising from the theme of Identity and Visual Cultural applied to the Insular Traditional Costume, as a motto for the creation of a jewellery collection:
   1. Research the works and documents that allow characterising the visual culture of traditional costumes and the process of recreation, from the point of view of endogenous and ancestral resources;
   2.  Characterise the identity, visual grammar and realities of Portuguese regional island costume, in relation to the cultural preservation and symbolism of the two communities under analysis;
   3. Identify previous studies on the object of research in question, to seek to understand the correlation between traditional costume and the application of adornments, in the panorama of social roles associated with the female gender;
2. To decode the creative language of the traditional costumes of the Azores, Madeira and Corsica Islands, from the perspective of the development of society and contemporaneity:
   1. Corroborate and analyse the recreations of traditional costumes of the archipelagos, with a view to producing a jewellery collection;
   2. Implement sustainable and ancestral processes in the production of the aforementioned collection;
   3. Analyse the submitted proposal from the point of view of its ability to establish cross-border cooperation partnership relations.

The methodological roadmap will be exploratory and with in situ, punctual work. For this research we intend to apply a mixed methodology, quantitative and qualitative, in a cyclical triptych approach: observation, conceptualisation-theorisation and intervention. With observation, the research process will allow us to collect information from the essentially descriptive survey of the approaches to Cultural Heritage and the Use of Traditional Techniques, with the aim of recognising and determining the predominant configuration of the Traditional Costumes approach, within the conceptual framework of Insular and Identity Culture, as an observer-creator and researcher-observer. As for the conceptualisation-theorisation phase, the research process will be developed based on the characterisation, from an inductive perspective, of certain sets of traditional costumes, in the approach of the conceptual framework, object of this research, in order to define the referred approach and, conclusively, propose the design and construction of a model of visual creative language. In the intervention stage, the investigative process will present the execution of the intervention project created in the previous research phase, in order to verify to what extent the process and the product of this model aim at the appropriation of visual grammar according to the references of the conceptual frameworks, where clothing is assumed as the main actor and engine of development of local and tourist culture, through an emotional, inclusive, sustainable and responsive offer.