Working with Hands: Surprised with the Common, Accustomed to the Strange

Abstract: Last November, in the School of Architecture of Madrid, a heterogeneous group formed by twenty students and six teachers from different academic backgrounds and nationalities shared an intensive workshop whose title «Working With Hands» did not clear up its real intentions, which were to set hands in the center of human activity, from the daily survival level to the artistic one, considered as makers, models, mediums, and instruments in art. ?Defamiliarizationestrangement*?: Could hands be understood far from our own body experience? A gradual defamiliarization process that ensured to achieve this difficult goal was set off. Estrangement experience like a scientific approach to reality is based on the consideration that any identity must be placed out of us in order to be known critically and independently from our daily lives and beliefs. ?First action; then reflection?: We developed strategically diverse actions that removed gradually different knowledge levels in order to avoid global perceptions we are accustomed to. We worked first without sight, then without voice, later without hearing, finally without prejudices and restricting thoughts. ?Cartography?: Once we had finally managed to consider hands as images, we made a cartography by creating partial conceptual maps. Diverse layers of images organized in unexpected categories allowed us to discover new relationships among unknown variables and parameters about hands, while old categories were getting destroyed. ?What a hand is??: With our endless but finished atlas, we tried to establish the limits and define our research object: a hand is anything different from those things that are not hands. ?Conclusion. World as an atlas?: «Working with Hands» was an active metaphoric course where we came to approach the world around us through actions of defamilarization from everyday life, in order to fuzzy the boundaries by including variables that prevent our maps from leaving out «the others»