With a shared objective in mind, the artisans of the Artesanos de La Cumbre collective established this unique enterprise. This corporation serves as the focal point for various crafts, encompassing weaving, ceramics, leatherwork, woodworking, and painting. Its members hail from diverse backgrounds, including public accounting, systems engineering, education, the hotel industry, and the arts. What binds them together is their shared aspiration to preserve what they refer to as ancestral arts and to provide the youth in their community with opportunities to to make a living as craftspeople. In the long term, their dream is to establish their own Arts School, in order to inspire the young offering them formal education.

Comprising 21 members, the corporation is led by its president, Gustavo Enriquez, who, despite his background as a systems engineer and educator, discovered a platform within the group to fulfill his mission of assisting the youth, for whom he works and devises all his plans. He envisioned creating jobs and fostering familiarity with one of his passions, technology. Having come across craftsmanship, he found out it benefited from leading edge technology and was a field in which young people could find their call and a livelihood. Within the collective, Gustavo encountered individuals like Gerardo, a public accountant specializing in taxation who also happens to be an artist. Gerardo has run a hotel for 15 years, boasting a collection of 260 species of heliconia flowers. Apart from this, he engages in painting, weaving, ceramics, and stained glass artistry, and is deeply interested in imparting diverse techniques. As a member of the group, he discovered a venue where he could blend his entrepreneurial pursuits with his desire to teach. He conducts courses for hotel guests and those intrigued by the craft, both at the hotel and in collaboration with the corporation.

Having come together, these artisans formulated a five-year plan. They resolved to dedicate each year to a distinct ancestral art, offering courses and devising strategies to make the techniques more accessible to the community. This endeavor took into account the broader context. Historically, La Cumbre was a coffee producer town. The railway traversed the town, sustaining numerous families engaged in crafting coffee sacks. Consequently, this was a town of weavers, and also of ceramists. However, until now, craftspeople had not come together as a group. Furthermore, artisans typically sourced their materials from the capital city, Cali, and aspiring learners deal with the elevated costs of supplies and tools.

In the inaugural year of the project, 2022, their focus centered on weaving and looms. The group quickly realized how challenging it was to manufacture a loom. They embarked on learning to craft looms traditionally, while also exploring 3D printing and laser cutting techniques. As a result, they now have their own lightweight, detachable, and affordable María and table looms. They can be easily transported to communal weaving sessions, solving both affordability and space constraints. As they venture into the second year of the project, dedicated to ceramics, similar challenges have arisen, yet they haven’t fallen short of solutions.. Thus, they are presently developing a potter’s wheel that is portable, cost-effective, and lightweight, for the wheels are typically expensive and hard to find.

In addition to their yearly technique focus, the group also sets a theme to guide their work. For instance, during the weaving year, their theme centered on the colors of La Cumbre. They drew inspiration from a local natural phenomenon where Pacific Ocean winds meet the continental winds, leading to the misty and vibrantly hued sunrises and sunsets that contrast against the green mountains, red semi-deserts, and clay-rich lands of La Cumbre. Likewise, the ceramics year finds its theme in the Multicolored Tanager, a regionally cherished bird boasting dazzling yellow, green, blue, and black plumage.

Undoubtedly, challenges will continue to arise, and this dedicated group of artisans will keep finding solutions. Their future plans encompass a focus on leatherwork, followed by woodworking and painting in subsequent years. As the initial five-year project concludes, La Cumbre’s residents will have access to new tools, machinery, and courses—all made possible by this imaginative and persistent collective. A visit to their community promises an opportunity to learn alongside them, immersing oneself in the realms of weaving and ceramics through their courses, specially tailored for curious tourists.