Pio Writes

1200m above sea level, 164 kilometres from Porto and 217 kilometres from Lisbon, in the Lousã mountains, a group of ceramists with various experience levels are feeding the wood-fired Sasukenei kiln built in 2015 by a group of Portuguese ceramists with the help of the master Masakazu Kusakabe.

The process will take 36 hours to reach the desired temperature of 1,285°C and another 18 hours to cool down. Then, the students will be able to see their pieces; often it will be a surprise as this type of kiln creates an unexpected finish. For the time of firing the kiln, the group is split into teams of two, and each team works two-hour shifts. By the end of it, the teams are thoroughly swapping observations. “How was the temperature, how did it rise, do we need to put wood slower or faster, ” told me Tatiana Simões, the Arts & Crafts School Manager. “They need to exchange this information because the kiln has pieces from all of them, and all of them have the responsibility to keep this fire under control.”

A week later, when the ceramists finished their work, came back to their regular lives, and the kiln cooled down, I drove 10 km from the closest town on a crooked, narrow road and parked my car one spot away from an EV charging station. I was asking myself a question: What does practicing an art mean in a remote place like this? Villages, towns, and even whole areas far from metropolises are often conservative; projects that don’t fit in the general pattern often are criticised, especially those involved in arts. I thought about the anonymity that big cities offer and the freedom of expression that comes with it. Back in London I used to visit one of Damien Hirst's industrial-sized studios every few weeks; his assistants could overpopulate a village like Cerdeira a few times. I've seen Ian Davenport's flooding his workshop with colour. I was alone in an ultra secured art storage with Van Gogh's painting, The Reaper, with the price tag between 12 and 16 million pounds. But I've never plunged in a forest that far from an irrational and buzzing art scene to learn about art.

When I arrived and left the car, silence. Parallel to the parking, behind a small col, a ridge. On top, obscurely like a fungi, arise stone houses of this same colour as the land around. Only a few birds gossiped, and the mountain air conveyed serenity. It’s the Cerdeira. I was walking the only path to the village, on an unpaved forest-like surface, wondering how possibly I could find my contact within this bundle of stone houses. Tatiana, a young woman with kind, black, like a Portuguese olive eyes appeared, and not letting me wonder for too long, smiled. “It's assuring there is a friendly person in the middle of nowhere that will meet you,” she explained. “When someone comes that far, the gentle welcome is essential”.

People that come for the ceramics workshop – Tatiana always calls them students – have many things in common. Their relationship with art, however, is often very different. Artists who are practicing art for a living come to this remote village to learn new techniques or meet the teacher they admire. Active retirees who, perhaps, never had a chance to be creative in their professional lives, choose this place, instead of famous tourist sites, to learn how to create. And then there are IT professionals. They are the most explicit about their expectations, Tatiana told me. They have had enough of staring at the screens, and they want to escape emails, endless meetings, and pointless offices. They desire creative work far from the hierarchy. They want to experience a meditative state, to fully submerge themselves in work on real things, using their own hands. For that woodwork or ceramics are perfect; when working with wood, it is necessary to be careful and present because safety is a priority; when working with clay, it is necessary to be gentle and present because even the smallest movement can dramatically change the shape of an object.

Students of the ceramics course almost half of the time keep the kiln hot, and the other half make their pieces in a workshop that its limited space could trick me into thinking it is in London or Paris or Berlin, or in any other city with dense population that is known for its art scene. White walls, storage shelves full of tools, and in the middle, turning stations so close to each other that it would be hard not to become part of the group. But just behind the doors it's nothing like a big city. I exit the workshop through the backdoor. Kiln on the left, below a stream with pure water that never stops, and ahead, a wall of a thick southern European forest: eucalyptus, mimosa, olive trees, and a classic cork oak with its scorched and crooked branches and clumps of tiny green leaves on top. I was sinking in this view, feeling any remaining stress residue fading away. My thoughts were slowing down. A buzzing art scene may stimulate productivity, but here, it's nature that stimulates. And it must be affecting the side of the art that is mystic, or even feral – I thought.

Alongside nature, the teachers guide the students to deconstruct creative constraints often taught in schools and then in adult life. They encourage students to experiment, to play with the material, and to make mistakes – these often lead to captivating results that wouldn't appear if the tense student would expect perfection. “There is no right or wrong; it's all about self-expression,” a teacher might say. Of course, the students learn best practices and proven techniques of working with clay, but they won't hear: “now you need to make a cup.”

This absence of traditional teacher-student hierarchy also appears in interactions between students themselves. “I was doing a course with Mathew Blakely recently, and next to me was a girl from Brazil, and I was learning from her something that had nothing to do with the ceramics,” said Catarina Serra, the general manager of the Cerdeira project. “You see someone that is doing something interesting, you ask, and they'll be happy to teach. And maybe the next day they will ask you about things only you know how to do.” This isn't a coincidence or magic of this place, though. “Not all the artists out there are keen on teaching; there is a lot of secrecy in some that believe their work and methods should stay in their ateliers,” said Catarina, voicing disappointment with this archaic notion. “We search for teachers that want to share their knowledge because they want the other people to also give it a go, experiment and try.”

Catarina was seven years old when she came to the village for the first time. Her parents, Natália and José Serra, now co-founders of the project, visited their friend living a contrarian lifestyle in the mysterious village far from their home near Lisbon. “They fell in love with this place,” told me Catarina, “and we were coming every time we could.” Back then, Catarina was spending whole days around the village, in the forest, playing with local kids, or hiding in secret spots. She was coming down only for meals and, occasionally, to help her parents; she was growing up submerged in nature. However, “at the time, I thought, I could never live here. Because we didn't have a road like we have now, we didn't have electricity, internet, or basic sanitation. It was candle or petrol light, a compost toilet outside,” Catarina recalls. She slightly sprang on her chair and said: “It was great for the family time, no TV, no internet, nothing to distract us from the present moment.”

That contrarian friend, the Catarina’s family visited years ago, is Kerstin Thomas, a co-founder of Cerdeira – Home for Creativity project and an artistic director of the Arts&Crafts School. It was her that rediscovered this village in 1988 when the village was in absolute ruin. Kerstin came from Germany on her hiking trip to Portugal – a year before the country unified. Having found the promise of freedom, she and her partner decided to rebuild one of the ruins. There was one more couple, and they wanted to build an art community, but convincing people from the outside to participate in this idea turned to be too hard. Back then, a popular opinion was that up in the mountains, in these cold, dark, and damp houses, only hippies, poor people, and drug users lived. That life was very hard – this opinion was kept alive in families of those who left the village in search of a better, industrialised life. The judgement discouraged the other couple. Only Kerstin and her partner stayed. They lived a slow life, built an atelier, and steadily began to make the village alive.

With help from the EU, they created an art festival. Elementos à Solta ran for 13 years, and it accelerated the project as a community and a business. Alongside that, Kerstin kept inviting local and foreign artists once a year for a weekend – to eat together, to talk, and to show what's new in the village. This way, the Cerdeira began to be recognised for its growing art community. Additionally, they joined the art residencies network Res Artis (https://resartis.org) that put this tiny village on the global map of arts and crafts. Argentina, Nepal, Germany – people began to come from all over the word. “We noticed at that time that this place inspires” said Catarina with a note of nostalgia, “we were off-grid and that was unique”. They began to organise workshops in Casa des Artes – a freshly restored house. It was an idea rather than a solid business plan, but they thought it was worth trying. “Beginnings were very hard, nobody would come, and we would organise maybe two workshops a year, “said Catarina, “wood and ceramics as an art wasn't popular at that time,” she added. However, the idea to run the workshops seemed to be obvious – Kerstin, an artist herself, had skills, tools, and space. Moreover, and most importantly, she was ready to share her knowledge and experience.

Objectively, the most sensible path to sustain this project, though, was to offer stays (they can sleep up to 50 people at a time), but in contrast to popular opinion, this model was unstable. The seasonal character of tourism was one of the reasons. Moreover, people that were coming purely because of the accommodation were disconnected with the village and what is happening there. Because the project was made by creative types who like to animate, they wanted to build something alive. They realised that investing in the community (instead of in properties) creates meaningful relationships between guests and the village. Word-of-mouth is their best marketing tool, and people keep coming back no matter the season. This way, they were able to escape the typical tourism model and most problems related to it.

When I was making notes for this article, I realised that Catarina and Tatiana, effectively, are curators – not of an art, but of the environment. Interestingly, the choice of the teachers who are open, the invitation to get involved in the village life, and the focus on the community were never part of their original business plan. It is a result of their gut feeling and a whole load of experiments. This managing style keeps the community growing, and that makes the project independent of government grants – they're employing 20 people; it is a lot for a village with only five families permanently living there.

By the end of my visit, I felt inspired and uplifted by the openness and honesty of the people I met there. I began to understand that the true value of art is in its community. Productivity and ego-driven creativity do not always mean free expression. In search of that freedom, many artists escape small towns and villages. But if an artist chooses to stay, she must face pushback and embrace her originality. “I think to be different is always an advantage, ” said Catarina with conviction, “because if people decide to come and get involved in your project, it means that they are truly interested in what you do, that they are agree with your values.”

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The text originally published on exploreXchange – Love living in central Portugal