À Capucha!

À Capucha! is a research-driven design practice that explores the relationships between craft, material and immaterial culture. It operates in broad spectrum of typologies and methods, designing such different artefacts as capuchas, books or exhibitions. À Capucha! runs an independent social brand with the same name that hand-makes traditional Portuguese capes (capuchas) in close collaboration with local artisans. For us, designing such different artifacts as capuchas, books, or exhibitions is invariably understood as a process that merges the dialectic relationship between purposefulness and beauty, stemming from the idea of tradition. To create our capuchas we work closely with local artisans in a constant exchange between design and production. We explore the technique of handwork in burel, trying to understand its potential and limits. This artisanal process gives us the freedom to test and iterate in an immediate way, which allows us to create unique pieces, or small runs, which are the result of a continuing tradition, combined with new formal proposals and concepts. In developing these partnerships we strive to bring a new drive to traditional handicrafts without relegating them to obsoletion or subjecting them to impossible standards of production.