Corme is much more than a coast of shipwrecks that lives in memory as one of the places hardest hit by the Prestige oil slick. Between the Roncudo lighthouse and the Illa da Estrela are hidden wild beaches and cliffs in one of the most fascinating landscapes in the north of the peninsula. But right in the middle of these two places, in booth 15 of the port of Corme, the redeiras work, making it possible to fish in difficult seas, from the Costa da Morte to Gran Sol. Their job consists of reinforcing and repairing the gear on a chain of hard and ancestral work.
Surrounded by traditional arts, with their table amid a hodgepodge of nets, traps, ropes, and orange floats that look like leftover props from a fishmonger’s, Corme’s redeiras talk as they weave with their bare hands. From time to time they stumble upon trinkets saved between mesh bags and decorated shells. Rosa’s French manicure looks impressive among the threads that, when knotted, magically raise a relief that seems to evoke the xerfa, that foam that remains among the waves rocking beyond the breakwater. Some neighbors peek out of the booth who stop to browse. They have not yet gotten used to the visits of journalists who come to this corner of Galicia attracted by its history.
Today, however, they are not repairing equipment, but are immersed in a training session for the particular way in which they have managed to diversify their trade. They are not just redeiras. They have become fashion designers.
Rosa, the one with the wonderful manicure, says that a few years ago “the workload took a tremendous downturn, so the Galician redeiras decided to join forces to fight for our rights.” Sailors retiring young had begun doing the work their mothers and wives had done for generations to supplement the economies of fishing families. Also in this cuts begin with women.
“It was more costly for you to clean houses, where are you going to end up”, they say, so those from Corme created their Illa da Estrela Association in 2009, which today has 15 members. Through it, they have achieved official recognition of their work as a trade of the sea. Many of them have been redeiras since they were 14 or 15 years old, like Rosa, Isabel, Maricarmen or Chus; others, the youngest, have found a practical formula to reconcile being mothers. But, for all of them, it is not only their means of subsistence, but a job that they are passionate about and, in their daily meeting full of complicity and retrenchment, makes them moderately happy.
But what kind of miracle leads a group of precarious workers to star in a capsule collection of bags for Zara? “It all started in 2012, through the association. Either we left redeiras or we diversified, so the Xunta offered us some courses. We had the knot technique and they taught us to organize a project. In those courses we learned to design, to sew with a machine… everything necessary to create designs with nets”. It was in that institutional program, called Enredadas, where the idea of ??making some very chic round bags arose, with the leftover nets and their ancestral knowledge to shape them. The idea was to complement with that the meager salary that the repair of fishing gear left them.
The first, a sea blue mini hoop bag from Corme, occupies a privileged place on one of the shelves on the wall of the booth: “Where were we going with this?”, they laugh. “But he had a very good start! That has united us to do more things, and every year we release a model.”
Since then, and in a constant recycling process, the neteiras de Corme have managed to take full charge —from manufacturing to distribution and sale— of a small factory of fashion accessories made entirely by hand from their leftover nets and ropes. . “The projects that they are giving us, such as the Zara handbags or the one we have with Carlos Martínez to recycle nets into baskets and goals, raise our morale. It is a lot of work, and sometimes it overwhelms us, but it is what gives us life”.
Rosana Agrelo, from the pet clothing and accessories brand The Painter’s Wife, is the one who is with them today. She defines them as “stars”, and she does not fall short: already in 2018, Loewe summoned them for a successful line of key chains. But just a few months ago, Zara, a watchful eye on the most original Galician crafts and attentive like no one else to emerging artists, proposed that they wrap their net-shaped art around the baskets of the Galician designer Sonia de Gerónimo for a capsule collection of bags. that have flown from the web. It is not surprising: each of these bags could require three or four hours of work by a redeira de Corme.
The commitment of Galician institutions to the craft sector began in 2012 to bear fruit. In 2003, the Fundación Pública Artesanía de Galicia had been created, co-organizer of courses for recycling the trade of redeiras and the viability of other artisan dreams. The foundation, in reality, collected an idea that was born in the nineties: the Galician Crafts brand, which has been fundamental in associating the old craft trades with a modern, sustainable and profitable sector. The redeiras bags carry that brand and are sold at fairs and venues associated with it, along with other decoration, fashion and goldsmith products, the star of Galician crafts whose roots go back to the Middle Ages and the Camino de Santiago.
This is how Chus Iglesias Prado, creator of Acivro, a jewelry brand with a shop in Compostela, makes us see it, who understands that the secret of the passion for handmade jewelry lies in its timelessness. Maintaining the old artisanal process of Compostela goldsmithing, in Acivro the inspiration comes from the territory, be it with its escornabois and vacaluras rings —species of Galician beetle— or its ladle bracelets: “I am a woman, a feminist and I feel a deep pride for our Galician culture which, how could it be otherwise, leaves a deep mark on my jewelry: I have a clear commitment that my work will make the country”.
It is no coincidence that the word art goes into crafts, nor is it the name that, in Galician, is attributed to the arts or ways of fishing that the nets repair. Since the Celts, crafts have managed to reach our days wisely combining creativity and utility, but, in a wonderful carambola, it has become a safeguard for the trades and ways of life of the past, still so alive in Galicia today. Crafts are also a sustainable art in which, after the pandemic, many people have found a way to reconnect with themselves. The real thing was just around the corner, and it had to do with what had been sucked in many Galician houses.
A good example of this is that of Concha Bello, a carpenter. Her Estaleiro Artesán is in Cabana de Bergantiños, not far from Corme. In her obradoiro, the sea is also paid homage through its cutting boards furrowed by fish, its racks full of starfish and, above all, in its fascinating lamps that look like shells or cliffs watched over by seagulls. A trained restorer, Concha Bello discovered an artistic vocation that was found in her family trade, her grandfather’s carpentry, so, when she was already over forty, she threw herself into the vocational training institute and graduated as a carpenter. “It’s what life gives me,” she says, and it sounds like something that everyone agrees on, that life where there is something that cannot be bought at Ikea: “There will be no other piece like it, and you will have it at home” .
Indeed, the story of Concha Bello, like that of the redeiras, is common in most artisans who have found their way in traditional trades, and inspiration in the wonders of the Galician landscape. This is what happens to an artisan project devised facing the sea during the stillness of the pandemic: Mar de Miranda, the atelier that the soap master Jessica Estraviz founded in 2020. In her case, the artistic challenge inherent in making a soap be a unique piece that speaks of the sea, we must add the objective of sustainability. For this artisan who cleans beaches in her free time, the commitment to local raw materials is the key.
As in many Galician houses, Jessica Estraviz’s house kept a knowledge that women were passed from generation to generation. Just as the repair of nets at sea contributed to making small fishing companies profitable, the domestic knowledge of women in other places was oriented towards optimizing resources. Why buy soap if you could make it at home? And when the mall soap chains are mentioned to her, Jessica is clear: “It’s not really competition. The soaps that I make have fundamentally natural oils that are not found in industrial soaps. They add chemical components or dyes, which I replace with clay or plants”.
Sustainability is inherent to the work of crafts, one of its pillars. That is why the redeiras maintain their longest collaboration over time, that of recycling the nets for baskets and goals, in a process similar to that of Concha Bello when she removes a unique lamp from a piece of wood that has detached from a piece of furniture; Or just like Chus Iglesias, it occurs to him to recover old silver ladles and give them a new life in the form of bracelets or necklaces, creating “pieces with soul”. There is in all of them a certain obsession with zero waste.
Sonia de Gerónimo also opted for crafts and sustainability as a formula to channel her career as a designer. “The idea was to create limited collections of everyday pieces that, apart from being functional objects, could also be decorative,” she explains. For her, as for the redeiras with which she signs Zara bags, a concept of sustainability based on not producing more than necessary, without stock, only on demand, is essential. Added to this is that it is based strictly on natural materials such as cotton rope, that it only works with local suppliers and that its machinery is rented, in order to support the circular economy.
Any conversation with an artisan implies the declension, with different nuances and colors, of the word “unique”. Also the reflection on the magic of imperfection turned into art. Everything handmade is also a tribute to the territory and the special energy that exists in the link between people and nature. That which seems to be stored in each atom of a handmade creation and is transmitted in the form of emotion and experience.
Despite the success of the project, the redeiras de Corme continue to be workers who only receive the press during their hours and at their booth 15 del peirao, telling what they do with automated dexterity while you wonder why they don’t make mistakes in the fabric while they talk. Right now, they say, they have “a proxectiño to start designing clothes.” Isabel clarifies that the amount will be small, but on-demand work makes things easier in that sense, and it is more difficult than it seems: “People don’t believe it, but the network is alive.” Her trade was already an art for traditional fishing. Now it is a beautiful craft that has allowed them to get closer to the goal of earning what they would earn in other jobs that they simply are not passionate about like this one.
