I recently spent 6 weeks in the Ecuadoran Andes, traveling city to city and village to village. In the tiny pueblo of Isinlivi, balanced on a ridge13,000' feet up in the mountains at the end of 50 K of hairpin dirt road I came across a school and tradition of woodworking of striking sophistication and quality -- and had to share this discovery with the folks here, who can best appreciate precise craftsmanship in solid wood.
As soon as I walked into the Llullu Llama Hostal I was struck by the quality of the woodworking in all the furnishings -- big hand-cut dovetails holding the front counter together, curved through tenons gracing the table tops where the legs joined from below, beautifully-fitted wedged through tenons fastening chair parts and generally sophisticated, precisely cut joinery in curvilinear designs. Virtually all surfaces featured hand carving, structural elements would be finished in a series of perfectly-matched, parallel shallow grooves, but show surfaces featured elaborate and geometrically complex carving.
I asked my host where he got the furniture and he pointed up the hill to the Don Bosco shop. The next day I hiked up to see if I could look in a window and instead met one of the craftsmen who gave me a tour of the operation and I realized I had stumbled across something rather special that I had never heard of before.
Don Bosco furniture is designed in Italy and built in small shops in the Andes -- in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador -- out of two species of solid wood by small groups of craftsmen who study under a master for 6 years. I visited two shops and saw that their power tools (jointers, planers and table saws) were big ancient iron sitting on dirt floors, often jury-rigged, wedged and shimmed.
But the product is crafted with precision in a clearly-defined, elegant design as characteristic and skill dependent in its own way as the American Arts and Crafts movement. Yet as well established as the tradition is in the Andean communities, it seems almost unknown in North America and Europe. They just don't export much.
However, small pueblos in the Andes have Don Bosco woodworking throughout: Church doors, pews, altars; many homes have accent pieces: tables, chairs, buffets. I saw more quality, solid wood furniture in these tiny mountain villages than you would find in half the homes in Canada.
Later when I got to a place with wi-fi, I googled Don Bosco and found that he was a Catholic priest very much involved in enabling the underprivileged, so added to the beautiful and skilled design tradition is a context of social consciousness and economic liberation that I found pretty powerful.
And I could not think of a group that could appreciate this more than the craftspeople at the Creek. You can google Don Bosco Woodworking to find more, but I took a few photos to share here.
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