Marc Alós

In a glob­alised world like ours, find­ing an orig­i­nal Christ­mas pre­sent has be­come in­creas­ingly dif­fi­cult, but the ca­ganer is some­thing every­one likes; it’s dif­fer­ent, funny, and not ex­pen­sive,” says Marc Alós, from the com­pany that makes the fa­mous crap­pers. Ca­ganer.com is a fam­ily busi­ness that was set up in 1992 by ce­ram­i­cist Ana Maria Pla and her hus­band Josep Maria, with the help of their two sons, Marc and Sergi, who are now in charge of the busi­ness. Marc is a sculp­tor and Sergi runs the sales de­part­ment. The small ir­rev­er­ent fig­ure of a man doing his busi­ness, re­quired in any na­tiv­ity scene, are very pop­u­lar, and now there are ca­gan­ers rep­re­sent­ing pub­lic fig­ures from the local and in­ter­na­tional scene. They pro­duce about 50 new char­ac­ters every year. “It’s an orig­i­nal gift, some­thing from here that doesn’t exist any­where else in the world, and which rep­re­sents the Cata­lan sense of scat­o­log­i­cal hu­mour. We try to keep up-to-date with the news and in­tro­duce more fe­male char­ac­ters, like this year with Ter­essa May. Gen­der equal­ity is im­por­tant in the world of ca­gan­ers, too,” says Marc.

1. Fa­ther Christ­mas. The first ca­ganer I made, back in 1992.

2. The clay. Our basic ma­te­r­ial. For us, it is very im­por­tant that all the ma­te­ri­als we use are lo­cally sourced. We buy our clay from La Bis­bal, to make sure it’s local and good qual­ity.

3. Tools. These help us clean and give shape to the ca­ganer once we take it out of the mould, when it’s rough and needs pol­ish­ing. Each piece is hand­made, so it’s unique.

4. A bag full of talc. This helps pre­vent the clay from stick­ing, and so the pieces don’t break when han­dling them.

5. Water. The clay and water com­ple­ment each other. Water is needed to get the re­quired de­gree of mois­ture, and it helps fin­ish off the pieces.

6. Sponge. To­gether with water, this helps with tidy­ing up and fix­ing what­ever doesn’t look right.

7. Mould. A key tool, this one is Ein­stein and of course each char­ac­ter has their own. We make them in our work­shop, first with a model, then with a spe­cial sil­i­cone, and it has two halves, each one for a part of the char­ac­ter. The process is long and re­quires lots of pa­tience and ex­pe­ri­ence.

8. Paint­brushes. These are needed to paint the un­treated ca­ganer. We’ve got many and dif­fer­ent kinds, some used to fill in the fig­ures, and oth­ers for small de­tails, such as eyes, eye­lashes... We use a fine Russ­ian brand, made of Eu­ro­pean pine marten (Martes Martes) hair.

9. Paint. We try to use paint and colours to make them look real, but also mak­ing them as vivid and at­trac­tive as pos­si­ble. For David Bowie’s, for ex­am­ple, we stud­ied many pho­tos of him and then made a de­sign eas­ily recog­nis­able to every­one, but eye-catch­ing in terms of colours and out­fits.

10. Books. This is a sym­bol of our love for read­ing and the fact that we’re mainly self-taught. We stud­ied how to make moulds at the Es­cola de Ceràmica in La Bis­bal, but in our job we need con­stant train­ing and we do mono­graphic courses very often. We had to learn a lot by our­selves, too, so I chose books to rep­re­sent that part of our job.

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