Geneva - Leatherwork gets a makeover

Tribune de Genève, Wednesday June 28, 2017, text and photo Iris Mizrahi

Rebirth of a threatened profession

In his workshop in Carouge, Chris Murner is relaunching the apprenticeship of leatherworkers, who disappeared in Switzerland years ago. Small miracles sometimes happen through the grace of skill and wit. In the Antre-Peaux leather workshop in Carouge, Chris Murner has been producing as many ideas as bags for thirty years, constantly updating a craft intrinsically linked to the history of the Sardinian city. A trainer at heart, she also works for the rebirth of a profession threatened with extinction.

Tailor-made training

When the Office for Guidance, Vocational and Continuing Education OFPC offered Chris Murner to reinvent training in Geneva by delivering both theory and practice in his workshop, she embraced the project with enthusiasm. The new federal law on vocational training makes it possible to delegate (under certain technical and pedagogical conditions) the entire apprenticeship course to a company, considering it as a vocational training centre. “In this context, the State can finance the company at the same rate as if the young person were taking lessons in a school, recalls Grégoire Evéquoz, director general of the OFPC. To keep training alive, you need enough flexibility. on the part of the administration in order to propose alternative learning models that go beyond the conventional, based on trust and the ability to innovate."

From the concept of a collection to its production, the apprentice leather workers of L’Antre-Peaux are thus involved in each stage of the creation process. In this unique learning environment, four of them have already obtained their CFC. And Grégoire Evéquoz hopes that "the experience we conducted with Chris Murner will generate other formative impulses in the arts and crafts sector."