A Letter on the Work

We are living through a particular moment — one in which the hand is slowly disappearing from the creation of the world.

Machines build. Algorithms design. Robots assemble. And increasingly, we watch.

This project is, in part, a response to that disappearance.

At its core, the work is not about producing objects. It is about creating conditions — for people to build together, to be present with one another, and to participate directly in the shaping of something real. Large-scale structures that invite many hands. A process where making together is the point, not simply a means to an end.

I arrived at this work through industrial design, and through gradually recognising the limits of what industrial systems can offer. Within large-scale art, I found something different: a space where material, people, and environment meet without mediation. Where the body is required. Where other bodies become involved.

This matters to me because of what gets lost when we remove the hand from creation.

We tend to think of ourselves as Homo Sapiens — the thinking being, the knowing being. But we are also something else. We are Homo Faber: the maker, the builder, the one who shapes the world through the act of fabrication. And we are Homo Ludens: the player, the one who enters into shared, structured experience not for a destination, but for the aliveness of the thing itself.

These are not abstract categories. They describe what happens when people come together to build something that didn't exist before — the way knowledge moves through hands, through coordination, through bodies working alongside other bodies. The way a kind of intelligence emerges that thinking alone cannot produce.

The value was never only in the output. It was in the doing. In the contact between person and material, between one person and another.

This is what AI and robotics, for all their power, cannot replicate. Not because the outputs aren't impressive — they are — but because the value was never only in the output. It was in the doing. In the rehearsal of what it means to make something together.

This is why I believe art has a particular capacity here. its malleability. Not only art as a finished object, but art as process — as a space where there is no predetermined outcome, where what gets made is inseparable from how it gets made, and by whom. Art that gathers people rather than addresses them. Art that requires participation rather than observation.

The structures are designed to exist across three scales — each proportionally related — so that they can adapt to different contexts, communities, and capacities. The designs are produced for CNC and laser cutting. This is deliberate. It allows the system to be fabricated almost anywhere in the world. Even in places where resources are limited, the infrastructure often already exists.

But fabrication is only the beginning. The work is always meant to be assembled by many hands.

When people build together, something else is constructed alongside the object itself: rhythm, trust, attention, care. The philosophical grounding of this work draws on the design theorist Tony Fry, who proposes that everything we design, in turn, designs us back — and on Andean and Quechua philosophies of Minga, where communities gather to build what is needed through shared effort and mutual care.

If it is true — that what we make makes us — then the question becomes: what kinds of worlds are we rehearsing through the things we create?

This work is my attempt to rehearse a different one.

A world where the hand is still involved. Where making is still a shared act. Where communities — especially those who carry deep, intergenerational craft knowledge that global systems have largely overlooked — can participate in the creation of something at scale.

I don't yet know what shape this project will take in the coming years. It may grow, transform, or become something entirely unforeseen. It may become art. It may become shelter. What I do know is that I am committed to the process — because large-scale work has the capacity to shift perception, to gather people, and to create experiences that are both physical and immediate.

This is, in its simplest form, an invitation.

Not to consume something that has been made, but to be part of the making.

— Angie

With gratitude to Eleni Kalantidou, Tony Fry, and Anne-Marie Willis for their influence on this thinking, and to the Andean traditions from which I come, where forms of collective making have long existed.