Thinking Hands

Before becoming a textile designer and later an artist, Akash learned to spin from his grandmother. This kind of knowledge, passed from one generation to the next, is rarely captured in clear instructions or written rules. It emerges through repetition, correction, and support: through doing something together, in relation to materials and surroundings.

In his work, Akash creates this experience of tangible and collective learning for others. Through storytelling, he encourages people to engage directly with materials, guiding them through gestures, resistance, and rhythm. While crafting together knowledge is formed as judgement, by slowly gaining the ability to move and manipulate a material.

But there is a catch: how can such hand-based knowledge be held onto? Unlike written knowledge gained in formal education, it cannot easily be stored as information or recalled on demand. In this session we will focus on the retention of this knowledge as an ability to return to and remember. The goal is to see our body as an archive to re-enter a way of sensing, thinking, and acting long after the moment of learning has passed. Rather than looking at it from a distance, we pick it up again through hands-on practice, tracing how these moments live on in the relationships between materials, people, and the things we make.

The process

To underline the focus of our session, we will start the day making something with our hands. Through Akash’s method of collaborative spinning and a trading-card game we will explore some of the main questions of this session. You will bring home one of the cards with the thread you spun in pairs. 

After this session Akash will introduce his work and his research question. The lunch included in the session, pani puri (vg), will also be made and eaten with our hands. 

For the final part of the session Akash asks participants to bring or introduce something they have made. We will map the relationships between these objects and the relationships they represent – those we have with others, with our culture, our environment or with the material. Capturing our findings from the session on a large map we return to the question what methods can help us hold on to what is known by our hands.