September 2025
World Cyanotype Community Event
La Specola, Verbania, Italy
Can we collect and preserve gestures?
This project started with a worry about our loss of embodied knowledge and how our lived, felt-sense experience of making and touching is eroding with the prevalence of digital culture. This particular loss of cultural diversity feels as profound as the loss of biodiversity.
And it’s not only about traditional craft skills or the ability to make objects by hand, but about the gesture itself. That deeply embodied thinking process set into the movement of the hand. As more of our lives are mediated through digital devices, our hands are increasingly used for pointing and observing rather than making. The index finger sliding across glass has replaced the palm’s intimate embrace of the material world.
Yes, cultural heritage can be intangible, too. We know we can preserve stories, songs, and skills, but what about the smallest particles of everyday human experience? The fleeting, creative gestures that connect us to reality and meaning? Tim Ingold reminds us that hands don’t simply execute; they think with materials. When we lose those gestures, we lose a way of reasoning (and being human) through touch.
The Thinking Hand Gesture Collection is a community project focusing on creative hand gestures as cultural heritage. Community members in the town of Verbania were invited to recall a gesture of handling something: a range of gestures from using a craft tool to a kitchen utensil or even a wind-up toy, that they hadn’t handled at least a year back in the past. Together, we choreographed the gestures, practiced them, admired, and briefly froze them in time, to then print them as cyanotypes on handkerchiefs (those small blank fields of imagination that are also disappearing).
The resulting light impressions were a mesmerizing mosaic of human hand felt-sense and memory. This collective action was exhibited at the Lakeside Gallery in Verbania, but its ultimate goal is to help us all to notice, appreciate, and reinhabit those small, everyday gestures that make us who we are.
The project is ongoing in other communities. Stay tuned.