Working with Hands: Surprised with the

Common, Accustomed to the Strange

Atxu Amann y Alcocer, Madrid Polytechnic University, Spain
Katerina Psegiannaki, Madrid Polytechnic University, Spain
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".
*Defamiliarization=Estrangement
Keywords: Action Pedagogy, Defamiliarization, Hands Cartography

ast November, at 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. Its title, Working with Hands was purposefully
misleading and did not illustrate our real intention, which was to place hands at the center of
human activity, from the daily survival level to the artistic one, contemplating hands as makers,
models, mediums and instruments of art.

Background
Being opposed to Plato's Republic that aspired to an unfair, hierarchical and totalitarian
monarchy, Epicurus proposed a philosophical community built on friendship; a place for those
who aspire to rule over themselves; a community for individuality. Epicurus garden is founded
on an ethical contract and a personal commitment for individual transformation.
The Onfray (2008) project was an initiative of collective marginalization through an
unmentionable artistic intensification in a radical community in order to become differently
equal. Onfray proposed a similar place, an Epicurus garden, located out of ordinary time where
one could practice sweetness, searching tirelessly for demystification and defamiliarization.
Nietzsche wished a laboratory of friendship and philosophy, a place where the teacher learnt
and taught how to be free and emancipated, aspiring to friendship, where neither teachers nor
students accepted their role in a strict sense.
Freedom is spontaneity; it is autopoiesis; it is learning how to act out, to unveil the genius, to
treat with nymph, to create characters; to flow without thinking; to deal with the strange, in
unprejudiced ways, accompanied by the music of life.
The International Journal of the Arts !" #$%!&'(: Annual Review
Volume 7, 2014, www.artsinsociety.com, ISSN 1833-1866
Common Ground, Atxu Amann y Alcocer, Katerina Psegiannaki, All Rights Reserved
Permissions: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com

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Along with this project, we wanted to form a cavity inside the strict academic program of
the architectural studies a place where this kind of unprejudiced behavior to strangeness could
take place.

Opposing the MindBody Division in an Academic Scope

We are accustomed to an academic environment where teachers are the transmitters of a preestablished course material and students are the receptors, giving or receiving lessons in a facing
position. In this type of transmission, that is usually unidirectional, body barely participates.
Apparently its a mind based procedure.
However, as many researchers observe, knowledge is not only a mind matter. The first
knowledge is that of the body and yet, in the tradition of scientific knowledge the body became
the first epistemological obstacle (Pacheco 2004, 185).
As Sacha and Keijzer (1996, 453) say, the theoretical and linguistic conception of mind
supports the traditional, that is, the Judaeo-Christian, notion of a gap between reason, on the
one hand, and action-emotion-will, on the other, and accords with the experience of a conflict
between reason and weak flesh.
This gap between mind and body, as we examine it here, or between reason and action or
reason and will-passion-emotion-motive as Sacha and Keijzer observe, has its roots in the socalled Cartesian conception, where the mind, the thinking soul or consciousness, is the all
important human principle: in the end mind can do without the body.
Though, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinctive idea of myself as something
which thinks ... and, on the other hand, I have a distinctive idea of a body which is
spatial and does not think at all, it is certain that I, that is, my soul, by which I am what I
am, is entirely and certainly separated from my body, and that it can be or exist without
it. (Sacha, Keijzer 1996, 453; Descartes, 1641)
According to Lourdes Pacheco (2004), science founded by Descartes was opposed to the
body and its products. The body is not yet involved in the act of knowing. However she, among
other researchers, attempted to recover the body in order to reconsider knowledge. This means to
recover and raise the subject of the knowledge - the observer - and in this way give an alternative
to the current alienation of the learner in respect of his or her object of learning.

Hands, the Object of the Study

So, the goal was to achieve a body-mind, as well as a mind-action/emotion/will, union
experience. With hands as the object of the study we decided to work with them not only in a
literal wayhands touching, feeling, handling, making, working, grabbing, dancing,
gesticulating, molding, knitting, communicatingbut as also as the object of a scientific
research, observing all of their characteristicsanatomy, functionality and appearance. In this
way, we attempted to make an approach to the matter of study in a both corporal and mental way
and of course, in a ludic way.
Playful learning includes promoting heuristic and creative work, linking action to pleasure
and enlarging our capacity of the environmental perception. By including all sensitive levels we
develop the feeling of criticism, promoting intellectual connections and assuming social
negotiations. We manage to achieve the highest level of cooperation on teamwork; bringing out
empathy as the best way to eradicate any kind of inequality that makes us accustomed to the
uncertainty and face situations, thus neutralizing the fear of failure.
We chose hands as the study object, because we considered that they are the first mean of
our work as architects and artists. Hands are the organs that connect our minds with the outside
world in the process of making. We believe that our hands are capable of transforming our



AMANN Y ALCOCER AND PSEGIANNAKI: WORKING WITH HANDS

conceptions of living and of producing new and unknown things. Their way of moving, acting
and making, enriches our intentions.

Defamiliarization-estrangement: The Observed Observer

To work with hands as the study object we first have to achieve a state of defamiliarization
concerning our own body experience. To achieve this kind of defamiliarization, we called
estrangement, we have to act as observers of our own hands and body as well as of our own
acts.
Humberto Maturana was one of the researchers we earlier mentioned, who is in favor of
placing the observer, as a body-mind union, in the center of observation. As he characteristically
points: anything said is said by an observer. (Maturana 1980, 9)
The observer beholds simultaneously the entity that he considers (an organism, in our
case) and the universe in which it lies (the organism's environment). This allows him to
interact independently with both and to have interactions that are necessarily outside the
domain of interactions of the observed entity. (Maturana 1980, 9)
In our case we wanted the students to act as observers who set their own hands as the
observed entity. To achieve this state of observation we had to perceive our hands as independent
entities, as something out of us, outside of our own body experience. We believed this process
would drive us toward that kind of estrangement we wanted to achieve; a defamiliarization
experience concerning that part of our bodies.
Defamiliarization, as a scientific approach, is based on the consideration that any identity
(object, action, place or being) must be placed outside of ourselves in order to be critically
known, independently from our daily lives and beliefs.
For the observer an entity is an entity when he can describe it. To describe is to
enumerate the actual or potential interactions and relations of the described entity.
Accordingly, the observer can describe an entity only if there is at least one other entity
from which he can distinguish it and with which he can observe it to interact or relate.
This second entity that serves as a reference for the description can be any entity, but the
ultimate reference for any description is the observer himself. (Maturana 1980, 9)
We had experimented with these kinds of processes before in other areas of our work but it
was the first time we tried to experiment using a part of our body. We knew that this feeling of
estrangement (or defamiliarization) arises spontaneously in repetitive daily situations, for
example, when the butcher manipulates pieces of animal meat or the surgeon operates on the
human body. Considering these operations as scientific approaches and objective analysis of
reality, produces a particular knowledge we are interested in. It is like seeing frames of a movie
in which every image has a striking appearance.
This scientific operation according to the intentions of the observer can also turn out to be an
artistic process. Dadaism is its principal representative. The semantic defamiliarization, the
divorce between signifier and signified, the creation of sign systems capable of producing
inedited meanings, are revealed, as instruments of struggle against the reified universe of the
ordinary. (Tafuri 1994, 11)

Act First; Then, Reflect

As real supporters of Arendts philosophy, we perceive action as the only possibility for
something new and inedited to appear in our world. As Fernando Brcena (2006, 194) observes,


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for Hannah Arendt action is irreversible; it leaves its traces and there is no way to undo it.
Besides this, action is unpredictable in its outcome. Any action triggers other action. While
acting we are not aware of what we are doing. So we first attempt to act and afterwards reflect on
our action and its outcomes.
Considering also the gap we previously mentioned, between reason and action-will-passionemotion-motive, we place this way of thinking in the center of our course planning. We
strategically developed diverse actions that gradually removed different knowledge layers in
order to avoid global perceptions we are accustomed to.

Without Seeing. Without Sound. Without Hearing.

The understanding of the body as an instrument or as a toy to feel pleasure with involves a
radical change in the idea of learning based on an emotional foundation of freedom. Unconscious
knowledge of the body produces essential knowledge which is the basis of all art making.

However nowadays, vision-based learning or learning through technological extensions of

the eye is predominant. This visual hegemony imposed on learning processes imposes in turn
several codes of understanding often authoritarian.
Unfortunately we are used to rely heavily on the sense of sight. Our approach to others,
when we are able to see, contains many prejudices coming from visual data such as our specific
way of dressing, age, gender, social role, ethnic group and so forth. Therefore by taking away the
sense of sight we wanted to make the students be aware of the perception inputs linked to
ideology but also make them concerned about unusual facts of recognition such us weight,
softness, warmth, movement, density, texture and moisture felt by their hands. We also wanted
to make them concerned about other facts of recognition, such as the voice tone and the speech

fluency, registered by other senses like hearing or even the smell as the most primitive sense that
provokes the most durable memories.
Once the students got their eyes blindfolded in the corridor outside the classroom, they were
guided inside it and were introduced by shaking their hands without seeing. Then, they had to



AMANN Y ALCOCER AND PSEGIANNAKI: WORKING WITH HANDS

choose a pair and model each other faces using their hands to perceive by touching and then
forming the clay.
When they could finally see what their hands had produced, they couldnt express their
impressions as they were left without voice. We asked them not to speak; they had to
introduce themselves only by making signs with their hands that belong to an unknown language
for most of us. We realized the difficulty of exploring the freedom of hands because our
imaginary sign language is also ruled by stereotypes. We could feel for a while the silence and
the loneliness in our world.

Without Memory: Cartography

Without seeing, without speaking, without hearing little by little we went on removing our
information layers until we managed to lose our memory. We were left without prejudices and
without restricting thoughts having achieved a first approach on our defamiliarization process.
When hands are not linked with brain, far from desires and projects, they change into images
kind of representations of our sensations, emotions, wills, actions, passions and motives .
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire,
and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
- Suarez Miranda. Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658.
(Borges 1999, 325)
Every act of knowledge is a constructive activity. Following the bright metaphor of Borges
on maps and territories, we can say without doubt that our knowledge is always a map that tries
to represent an unknown territory, which is reality; and by definition, the map cannot be but an
outline of the territory, however it can never be identical to it. (Pozo 1996, 130)
In order to create our map of hands territory, we wrote a list of all those dispersed variables
that could describe them. What is a hand? Which are the limits that define it? Is a hand with no
fingers still a hand? Through multiple associations of images, the unknown variables could be
joined in new categories, in an attempt to make our cartography of hands. Smell, identity,
capacities, abilities, experience, final aspect, shape, distortion, surface, angles, feeling and
parametric characteristics of hands were pointed out and helped us to fill in our conceptual maps,
generating our hands atlas, inspired from the method carried out by Aby Warburg (2010).



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The Atlas, as Georges Didi-Huberman points out is:

a visual form of knowledge (...) whose destiny is to offer systematically to our eyes a
multiplicity of things gathered by elective affinities (...) from which one can get a new
kind of knowledge, which shows unnoticed aspects of the world. This is not to establish
a definitive classification, nor a comprehensive inventory, or catalogue once and for all,
as in a dictionary, a file or an encyclopedia, but collecting segments, pieces from a
fragmented world, respecting their multiplicity and heterogeneity, and providing clarity
to the relationships, now put in evidence. (Didi-Huberman 2010)

Without Memory: What a Hand Is

Therefore, we started our cartography by creating a seven meters long matrix full of partial
conceptual maps. Diverse layers of images organized in unexpected categories allowed us to
discover new relationships among unknown variables and parameters of the hands, while old
categories like gender, race, origin or other meaningless divisions were perished. Once the
process has been set off, it will never stop.
By observing the seven meters long matrix, completely covered with words, photos and
drawings, we felt that images were just in the center of our experience. We realized that images
were also carrying memories therefore we made a montage consisting of discontinuous and
heterogeneous segments of time however connected between them. Thinking in images is a
process of thinking in qualitative values rather than quantitative data, a process that is based on
synthesis rather than analysis.
So, with our endless (because it can never be finished) but completed atlas, we tried to
establish the limits in order to define our research object: what a hand is? We concluded that a
hand is anything different from those things that are not hands.

Without Thinking
In the meantime when we were not manipulating anything, we were knitting; an action that
joined together all workshops activities. The first day we learnt how to knit just looking at the
necessary movements carried out by the eldest members in the group. Once we managed to do it,
like our ancestors we were unceasingly making textiles in different colors and shapes; without
thinking; just leaving our hands to move, repeat and produce.
Knitting was one of the actions that had mostly impacted the participants who couldnt stop
knitting throughout the workshop. We couldnt understand that reaction but then we found out
what Richard Sennet said about the experience of repeating.
To repeat again and again an action is stimulating when it is organized looking ahead.
The substantial thing of the routine can change, transform and improve, but the
emotional compensation lies in the personal experience to repeat. This experience is



AMANN Y ALCOCER AND PSEGIANNAKI: WORKING WITH HANDS

nothing strange, we all know it: is rhythm. Already present in the human heart
contractions, the artisan has extended it to his hands and eyes. (Sennet 2009, 216-217)
Human intelligence is the ability to discover, weigh up and relate facts in order to anticipate,
plan and resolve questions. We observe two types of strategies that human use to be in the world
and act on it. On one hand, the invention and construction of specialized tools; that is, technology
as the basis of our survival. On the other hand, the language; symbols that represent the states of
the world. Tools, language and thoughts are always connected (Dunbar 2002). Throughout the
workshop we wanted to work with these elements always related with hands in order to cover our
field of work in both strategies.

Others Hand
Once we had successfully covered our first aim, to make a representative map of the territory we
decided to explore, it was easy to guess that time for imagination had come to take place in our
defamiliarization process. Although nobody noticed it, we accurately followed a designed
pedagogical strategy through a continuous action scheme which was crossed by different inputs
and diverse rules.
We had specified the common limits of hands so now we had to jump over them in order to
produce monster hands. We wanted to think about the others, considered as those elements
that certain ideology does not allow to be integrated, and are set apart because they have
something different in an unacceptable scale.
When the established codes of some reality are being questioned, unsuspected and ignored
variables are being revealed, threatening its integrity and restructuring its fragments. When we
use both images and words in an unusual way to describe usual subjects is when we are suffering
our first reaction and we learn to look on a strange way, making strange descriptions using
different media and new codes referred to everyday matters.
And again that old question expressed by the Situationists: the essence of art is the artistic
activity. The artworks are just material waste, residues of something that is much more important
and essential. We create and communicate through performance, building situations or objects as
if it was the first time, as if there were no formulas and methods. We dont try to understand
through the resulting images the significance they are linked to, but to create a particular
perception of the object. This attitude leads us to share alternative stances with creators that
decide to be deliberately segregated from the status quo, keeping always prepared to launch into
space.
After a walk along Prado Museums corridors, detecting significant alterations in the
paintings made by past artists, we enjoyed altering measures, modifying structures, textures and



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colors; changing proportions and geometries of our imaginary hand. Where the limits of the
representation begin to vanish is where the art and the thought progress towards new horizons.
The hand becomes a monster hand when its stereotyped image changes, and let us look at it
under novel, unknown and creative aspects and properties.
New and strange hands not only had unusual beauty, they also had capacities and developed
skills wed never dreamt about.

Hands in Motion
We wanted to explore this new situation and we needed to set our monster hands in motion, but
they were almost immobilized. Handicapped and disabled hands amplified our desire to move
them under non - habitual gestures. In silence, we learnt about the basic movements of Sign
language in order to establish short conversations.
The single most remarkable feature of Sign that distinguishes it from all other languages
and mental activities is its unique linguistic use of space... We see then, in Sign, at every
level -lexical, grammatical, and syntactic- a linguistic use of space: a use that is
amazingly complex, for much of what occurs linearly, sequentially temporally in speech
becomes simultaneous, concurrent, multileveled in Sign... (Sacks 1990, 88)
Then, sound came in our space. Flamenco music led us to a flamenco dancing session where
we discovered a different language of our body and hands while we continued with our
defamiliarization process. That night, when we joined a tablao spectacle, nobody felt like a
stranger. Dance is constructed with movements that have nothing to do with the habitual
gestures. If art uses the ordinary, its just a material within an unexpected interpretation, or
under a sharply deformed mask. (Tafuri 1994, 11)
Didi Huberman (2008) is refered to the dance as a poetry inspired in action, exploration on
distortion and questioning on existence. To be in motion means to stay out of matter, forming
fragments of time and pieces of configuration that are developed in an act of metamorphosis. To
be in motion is to transform a situation into an event. The "bailaor" structures the time in his
dance gestures by his extended extremities in that deep space that invents. You cannot be-in-theworld if you are not projecting yourself to it.



AMANN Y ALCOCER AND PSEGIANNAKI: WORKING WITH HANDS

To explain the great flexibility, mobility and expressiveness of hands, several studies came
to the conclusion that the human brain cortical fields for hands and fingers are much more
extensive and differentiated than those corresponding to other segments of the body members.
They are ten times more important than those of the feet (Schinca 1988). Gradually, we became
aware that we can get 700.000 different positions, using combinations of arms, wrists and fingers
(Davis, 1998). Depending on the cultural, natural, social, familiar or personal experience, these
positions will have different meanings, allowing multiple options for hands action in dance.
Marcel Mauss in his essay Techniques of the Body observes that man's first and most
natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body. Before
instrumental techniques there is the ensemble of techniques of the body (Mauss 1973, 76-75).
He supports the idea that certain ways of doing things or moving our bodies are cultural
outsourcing rather than natural ways of doing or moving - walking or sitting.
By moving our hands in unusual ways, with or without control, we amplify our mental maps
and knowledge on them. We realized their potential abilities to open new possibilities not only in
communication through sign and dance but also through all kind of making.
This was the point we wanted to stand out, by forcing our hands to move outside of the
ordinary in order to provide us with a new and more creative way of understanding what we are
doing and at the same time, dissolve all our prejudice on certain practices we did not use to know
or practice.

After reading Gesture and the Nature of Language (Armstrong, Stokoe and Wilcox 1995)
we deduce that in learning, sensory perceptions must be combined with movement, emotion and
action. Movement allows all perceptual categories and when it works together with feeling, they
become the background of significance. Previously Bell (1806) in Essays on the Anatomy of
Expression dealt with the anatomic development of human being and the relationships between
movement, perception, learning and expression.
In the exploratory actions from ludic and creative standpoints, we get the opportunity to
discover unknown worlds that belong to a Global World of humans where the common subject
are the hands; even without one, two, three, four or five fingers.

Conclusion: World as an Atlas



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Working with Hands was an active metaphoric course where we came in contact with the
world around us through actions of defamilarization from everyday life, in order to blur the
boundaries between the strange and the ordinary by introducing variables that encourage the
inclusion of the other in our mapping of the world. We can associate the figure of the hands
Atlas with a "never-ending work to rebuild the world."
Perhaps the most important social and ideological challenge, when it comes to art education,
is to understand our daily life mistakes and our responsibility to struggle hard to ensure decent
lives for everybody, without exclusions.



AMANN Y ALCOCER AND PSEGIANNAKI: WORKING WITH HANDS

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Atxu Amann y Alcocer: Doctor architect from the School of Architecture of Madrid. PhD
Professor at the School of Architecture of Madrid in the Department of Architectural Graphic
Ideation. Award for Educational Innovation at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (2009).
Principal researcher at consolidated UPM Group "Hypermedia, workshop space configuration
of the Department of Architectural Graphic Ideation. Responsible researcher on Educational
Innovation at Hypermedia Research Group that obtained the excellence prize in 2006. Since
1987 founding member of Extreme Temperatures office with which she has received numerous
national and international awards and her work has been widely disseminated in all media.



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Katerina Psegiannaki: Architect from the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece (DUTH,
2005). Diploma on Advanced Studies from Department of Architectural Graphic Design of
Madrids School of Architecture (UPM, 2009). Currently developing PhD at the same school and
department with title Theoretical Study for the contextualization of the pedagogical act in
teaching architecture. Has been collaborating with UPMs research group HYPERMEDIA in
several projects of educative innovation and in UPMs research Group DISCYT in bilingual
projects relative to the scientific and technical discourse. Since 2009 is founding member and codirector of HipoTesis magazine (www.hipo-tesis.eu).