Many Hands Make One installation

Many Hands Make One is a site-specific installation created for the project 1+1+1/2020 in the spaces of Assab One in Milan. Houses made of kilim carpets sewn together are suspended in the air to compose a nomadic village, the purpose of which is to celebrate craftsmanship as an art form and as exchange between cultures. Interpreting the architectural elements par excellence (doors, windows, roofs, frames, skylights, porticos, chimney pots…), the carpets are juxtaposed to form a unitary element, the primitive form, or in any case that which we perceive ideally as the first form of encampment, the house. This filigree architecture made of roof and suspended walls, without a plinth, is intended to represent the greatest homage to craftsmanship: many carpets make a house, many hands make unity. The carpets represent the symbol par excellence of vernacular craftsmanship, since they came about from manual weaving through the choral work of various people. The production of carpets needs a cohesive social group; in many cultures, the very design of the carpet is the representation of the symbols of the families that have produced it. The carpets on display belong to the collection by Produzione Privata, Michele De Lucchi’s laboratory that creates experimental objects, free from the involvement of any client and therefore created with the maximum expressive freedom, arising from know how with the hands – typical of artisan works – and from a philosophy based on the analysis of people’s needs. The production of the kilims was commissioned from Jaipur Rugs, a company manufacturing high-quality hand-crafted carpets and founder of the Jaipur Rugs Foundation, the organisation that has created the greatest craftsmanship network in India, guaranteeing women and men access to a series of services – social, financial, educational and health-oriented – and at the same time enabling women to become artisans within their own domestic settings. To date, the Jaipur Rugs Foundation has received the attention of the United Nations Foundation and supports 40,000 carpet artisans (of whom 80% are women) distributed over 600 villages in five Indian states. The installation Many Hands Make One shares the philosophy of the Many Hands Earth Stations research project presented by Michele De Lucchi and AMDL CIRCLE in 2019. These are five imaginary buildings of large dimensions destined for regions of the planet with specific climatic conditions. The expression of collective local know how, these structures were built by the hands of many people using traditional techniques, without resorting to advanced technologies. They honour the capacity for collaboration for a project for shared community living.

The 2020 edition of the 1+1+1 event has seen three contemporarily designers –in close dialogue – occupy all the spaces on the ground floor of Assab One: AMDL CIRCLE and Michele De Lucchi, the artist Loris Cecchini and the designer Yuri Suzuki worked in contact, interfacing with each other and sharing thoughts and layout plans to present a cohesive installation able to express and enhance the individual personalities. Just like in a human community. At the centre of the process of contamination between the arts there is dialogue and, in particular, the different languages with which the people of different populations and lands have succeeded in telling of themselves over the centuries.