THE HANDS THAT MAKE

The second edition of Accessible Objects turns its gaze toward the hand — that first and most fragile instrument of making. If the first edition questioned the status of the object, this one addresses the conditions of its becoming. At a time when the gestures of design are increasingly mediated through screens, algorithms, and automated fabrication, The Hands That Make proposes a return not to craft, but to contact — to the tactile, temporal, and fallible exchanges through which materials pass from one state to another.

The exhibition gathers a constellation of practices that trace the entanglement between the human and the material, between the body’s finite rhythms and the slower metabolism of matter. Clay, sand, metal, resin, hide — each carries a record of extraction, transformation, and touch. Through them, we glimpse a politics of slowness: a recognition that every object is an accumulation of gestures, failures, and revisions that resist the pace and polish of digital production.

This is not a call for nostalgia, nor a sentimental return to origins, but a critical reconsideration of what it means to handle — to shape, to bear, to care. The hand is not only a producer but a negotiator: mediating between intention and accident, imagination and gravity, what is desired and what the world will permit.

If, as Vilém Flusser wrote, “hands are not tools, but the makers of tools,” then The Hands That Make becomes an archaeology of gestures — an inquiry into agency itself. It asks whether the act of making might still hold a quiet form of resistance: not against technology, but against abstraction.

Here, the object is less a product than a pause — a temporary crystallization of movement, attention, and care. Through these deliberate acts of formation, we are reminded that making is never merely a means to an end, but an ongoing rehearsal of relation — a way of staying in touch.