Hands, tools and gestures

Doing things by hand means establishing a precise relationship between the object and its creator, a perceptible, visible transmittance of sensitivity and respect: and all this will be palpable to the person who ultimately possesses the item in question. A kind of ongoing relay between what our fingers can detect, in the folds of a piece of leather or in the curve of a frame, and the actual hands that have made those shapes possible.

The hands are a means of knowing: manipulating, grasping and transforming are actions that reveal to us the miracle of the senses and of our imagination. The experience of a gesture, repeated time after time with ever-increasing awareness and skill, enables us to tame a material, giving it a new form, and making it attractive, functional, ergonomic and personal: revealing what was already within it, perhaps hidden in the folds of a fabric, in the hardness of a wood, or in the lustre of a metal.

A pair of scissors, a rubber hammer, a vice, as well as templates, models, patterns and moulds: a vast abacus of equipment and supports on which the hands can draw to transform, cut and fold the materials that the hands have first inspected, checked and recognised. Almost like snapshots, in which the beauty of the object lies in what it is capable of doing and narrating once it has been handled: stories which are then handed down in every single Tacchini design.