Talking with Your Hands
A short conversation with Júlia Ventura about the workshop, patience and what the hands know before the head does.
When you look at a space for long enough, it stops being a set of walls and becomes a succession of hours. The same room is a different room first thing in the morning, when the light comes in sideways and makes the edges visible, than in the afternoon, when everything flattens and the materials seem quieter. To design with this in mind is to accept that no decision is final: an object that works at ten in the morning may disappear at seven in the evening, and the other way round. That is why it pays to work with few things, well chosen, and to let time do the rest of the work.
Materials have a memory. Wood darkens where the hand rests every day, metal turns more matt over the years, and glass keeps, in a way you can barely see, the way it has been cleaned. A project that takes this into account does not try to stop wear, but lets it in as one more collaborator. The result is never exactly what was drawn, and that difference, looked at properly, tends to be the most alive part of the work.
What is the first thing you do when you get to the workshop?
I switch on the light and touch nothing. I look at what was left exactly as I left it.
The hands have a patience the head does not. If you ask me to explain how a joint is made, I go blank; if you hand me the wood, my hands already know where to press and where to let go. Everything I have really learned I have learned by repeating, and repeating is a way of thinking that makes no noise. When someone asks me for a summary of the trade, I always say the same thing: it is a long conversation with the materials, and they have the last word.
And is that alone already work?
Yes, because often the solution from the day before is in plain sight and you do not notice until you have slept.
Then the hands come in, and they are quicker than I am.
What would you change about your trade?
Nothing. Maybe the noise, but without noise I would not know I am working.
The hands have a patience the head does not. If you ask me to explain how a joint is made, I go blank; if you hand me the wood, my hands already know where to press and where to let go. Everything I have really learned I have learned by repeating, and repeating is a way of thinking that makes no noise. When someone asks me for a summary of the trade, I always say the same thing: it is a long conversation with the materials, and they have the last word.