Theme for the academic year 2025/2026: The Hand, the Body, the Act of Making

Whether able-bodied or disabled, artists create, think and feel with their bodies, most often with their hands. Regardless of their medium and regardless of any physical or mental limitations, they touch, trace, model and sculpt matter using organs that are both sensory and productive, and which are the primary instruments of their activity. As Henri Focillon writes when discussing hands, they are almost living beings. ‘Servants? Perhaps. But gifted with an energetic and free genius, with a physiognomy.’ As neuroscience shows, bodily organs take on such autonomy in the creative moment that they seem to drive thought through their motor action. Yet to refer to the hands or the body as the “tool” or “servants” of the artifex is already to subordinate them to the eye and the mind. The priority of the intellect over manual labour comes from a tradition of thought, from Neoplatonism to modernism, which separates the idea from its realisation and thus justifies the superiority of art over craftsmanship.

How, then, can we overcome this division of artistic labour that relegates ‘doing’ to the background of artistic activity?

Anthropology, which has long explored the boundaries between the human and the non-human, will help us in this endeavour. This year’s course will therefore be devoted to a study of productive and sensory organs in art, based on a variety of works ranging from prehistory to the present day and on some major texts in art theory.

Schedule:
1st semester: 1st October to 17th December 2025

2nd semester: 21st January to 8th April 2026

More information about the teacher