Manufestae

Work is love made visible
Kahlil Gibran, "The prophet"

As a child, my head constantly echoed with my parents' warnings "Don't touch! Keep off!". Indeed, no sooner did I lay eyes on something, than I was reaching for it: to touch, to feel, to sense. Often, in my over-eager clumsiness, resulting in damage.
Because, more and above providing instant tactile gratification, everything turned out to be somehow 'composed' of parts. And - behold - everything had a story to tell: how someone prepared and assembled these (often quite disparate) elements. And how these parts combined and joined towards a purpose; all brought together by some amount of will and dedication.
I never overcame this magic of things made. To cut a long story short, I kept fumbling with tools and materials, taking time to discover how things are made, attaching to 'old stuff' and refusing to trash anything that wasn't entirely beyond re-use. Kept a hand on the ground, of sorts.
If this blog, then, has to be "about" something, it would be the celebration of the hand.
In these times of virtuality and globalization, values tend to be confused. We often fail to distinguish between ownership and legitimacy, nobility and descendance, credit and faith, creativity and fabrication. Artifacts witness and remind that human work (part of which is craftsmanship) is and shall always be testimony and mark of our potential, our natural source of rightfulness. And bliss. And what, more than the work of hands, epitomizes this quality?
So here I stand, another acolyte of the crafts. Within the scores of comrades-in-tools that make small and larger things just "because". Grateful I can share their gifts and spirit. Stepping back into the original meaning of 'digital'. Admiring the miracles of human hands - the mysterious interplay between haptic perception and manual creativity.
And here are memoirs of my excursions in those magical grounds where play, attention and necessity meet. Over and again.