argilla
Photographs from a therapeutic ceramics workshop. A documentary book about a place where nobody comes to make a beautiful object: they come to put their hands in the clay.
The book open on a spread
The workshop of Manuela Lupino, art therapist and ceramist, where clay is not a craft to master but a way to give shape to what is hard to say.
Photograph the healing while it happens, not the wound that came before: hands, tools, waiting. Never a diagnosis.
A 52-page photobook: an interview, then four chapters that follow the clay from the shelf to the kiln.
A language before words
The first thing Manuela asks is to get your hands dirty. For an adult used to being in control, a lump of shapeless earth is a short circuit: the fear of getting it wrong, the "I can't do this". To get past it she uses the pinch, an almost primitive gesture that works like a language of the body, before words.
The object that comes out at the end doesn't matter. What matters is what happens while you shape it: the thoughts that go round in circles move into the clay. The book opens with this interview, so that every photograph after it is read through her way of looking.