Magic, made with hands
This is a collaborative piece
TLJ X PASSERBY
It's no secret that at TLJ, we love Instagram. For us, its as much a field of inspiration as it is a place to turn to during times of absolute boredom. Recently, we noticed an upsurge of posts about mindfulness, healthy living, and a conscious and sustained effort to connect with what we wear, what we eat, and how we live our lives everyday.
To us tangibly, the first step to reconnecting and reaching into ourselves, seems to be through our hands.
When a draft has been lying unwritten for way too long, and the cursor is blinking anxiously at us through the harsh light of the computer screen, it's the friendly scratch of the pencil against ruled notebook paper that makes the task a little less daunting.
When home seems too far away, and even the biryani or kozhambu made with our mothers' recipes doesn't bring it close enough, the simple act of drawing up our legs onto a dining chair, drawing them closer to ourselves to sit cross-legged, Indian style, brings us halfway there while we eat these meals. The other half of the distance we conquer, by setting the spoon aside and scooping up the warm flavours and textures with the tips of our own fingers. We're home.
In our everyday lives at TLJ, through our hands is how we find home. Our hands take us to ourselves. They make things, craft things, bring our experiences and thoughts a tangibility and satisfaction that even the lazy wiggle of toes on a luxuriously fluffy carpet can't bring. We'd still lean down to touch the carpet with our hands to try to validate the truth of the carpet's alleged fluffiness.
Hands, make our experiences. Hands, make.
When we shared this idea with our long-term collaborators Passerby, they very promptly dug out videos from their archives, which, in their signature style and in different vignettes, encapsulated our thoughts perfectly. And so here you have it– a whole edition of the zine dedicated to exploring all things that our hands make.
As you step into this issue, our seventh, here's a curated selection of Passerby's videos that we hope gets your fingers wiggling to create some beautiful.