Who we are

ArteSol is a non-profit organization that has existed for nearly two decades, investing in the valuing and promoting of traditional Brazilian handcraft. Our strategies focus on the environmental, economic, social, and cultural sustainability of the communities to which we are engaged.

Our main goal is to support the protection of traditional handcraft making, promoting artisans’ autonomy and the socioeconomic development of their productive groups.

What we do

We engage on the formation and training of artisans for entrepreneurship and on cultural sponsorship, spreading knowledge by following and supporting the creation of public policies that strengthen and structure this sector, always inspired by possible connections between handcraft, popular art, Brazilian design, timeless fashion and all the economic, sociocultural, and environmental aspects of these relations.

Pilars


Training
Training artisans and productive groups, stimulating them into managing their initiatives efficiently as well as using new communication and trading technologies.

Cutural Sponsorship
Supporting the trading of the groups’ craft production, aiming at the formation, enlargement and strengthening of a consumer’s market who is sensitive to the values of fair trade.

Economic Sponsorship
Inspiring artisans and masters into keeping their traditions alive when it comes to the making of their handcraft work by promoting exhibitions, festivals, seminars, publications and documentaries in order to support the craft object as a cultural asset.

Public Policies
Influencing the creation of public policies for the organization and strengthening of the handcraft sector.

Services

ArteSol Network

The ArteSol Network was idealized in 2014 in order to promote the linking between each productive community, inventory techniques and cultural traditions that run the risk of being forgotten in the cultural memory, and stimulating new trades through a digital platform that works as a qualified store window for the Brazilian handcraft.
Since then, ArteSol has focused on the challenge of mapping masters, artisans, associations, retailers, and support organizations of the sector throughout the country, totalizing 124 members by carefully identifying groups that are effectively engaged with techniques, traditions and the sustainable management of raw material.

Artiz

Artiz is a curatorship Project that works through a traditional Brazilian handcraft, design, and popular art store that aims at approaching artisans who are supported by the ArteSol Network to the public, taking the Brazilian cultural patrimony out there into the homes of Brazilians all over the country. Nowadays, the brand commercializes exclusive objects from various regions in Brazil, made by 50 different groups of artisans specialized in the techniques of braids, embroideries, laces, ceramic, and weaving. All the profit is converted into the valuing of traditional handcraft and the training of productive groups.

Brazilian handcraft

The traditional handcraft is the product of knowledge that has been transmitted from generation to generation. Such passing does not only happen within nuclear families, in which knowledge goes from parents to their children, but also in a broader dimension, always based on the personal relations between those who teach and those who learn. Thus, the craft of the artisan who works with a traditional technique goes back to a knowhow that is loaded with a larger history than his or her own community’s is. Such ancestral dimension is the strongest source of wealth of the traditional handcraft and puts it in a place of great importance in the comprehension of the singular lives of each group and their relations with their territory, be them local or national.

The Brazilian handcraft is present across the country. It is the product of cultures, types of indigenous ethnicity’s knowledge from different regions, of linguistic-ethnic groups of banto and yorubá, enslaved in the African continent and brought to Brazil, as well as the many European or Asian immigrant groups, from Portugal, Spain, France, England, Italy, Japan, among others. In the crossroads between these different cultures and ethnicities and in the relations between them, traditional kinds of knowledge and expertise have gained new features, uses, and practices, which have built a Brazilian singularity.