CATALOG I - FOUR HANDED

BY ANA PAISANO

Ana Paisano is an architect that uses the photography as a tool in the Architecture process. She studied Architecture in FAUL (Lisbon, Portugal) and she did the last year of Mater’s degree in Tokyo University (Japan) with AUSMIP scholarship. Currently employed at Studio Mumbai Architects and living in Mumbai (India), she engages in parallel research on the architecture/craft interface.

Synopsis

This catalog is an informal study exploring the use of human feet in craft, manual labor and daily life in India. The people photographed have learned to employ their whole body in their labor.
The four-handed people of India have developed unique processes linking thought to production and performance, that most urban societies seem to have forgotten.
Learning a skill does not happen through verbal teaching but rather by the transference of the skill from the muscles of the teacher directly to the muscles of the apprentice. It is an act of simultaneous perception through the senses and bodily mimesis, or imitation. People learn by doing. The use of feet as hands is an unconscious process. For the people documented in this catalog, feet act as “extra hands” in a natural, instinctive way.
This document is an attempt to re-discover through the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Indian people, what it means for a human to be “four-handed”.