Passing craft practices in a place on the edge of time
The picture series „Manual Work“ deals with social spaces and people who spend a lot of their time making things or making them available for others. They often take things into their hands in different states of processing, workmanship or production. They are connected to things through eyes and hands in doing. Via the things and their doing they are connected to their working world, which usually fills their whole life world.
„Knowing who you are means knowing the moral space that surrounds you. In such a space questions arise about what is good and bad, about what is worth doing and what is not; and about what makes sense and is important to someone and what seems trivial and unimportant to him..“
(Taylor 1996, 56)
What is going on in this world? How do things relate to each other? What is important? What is the meaning of things, especially the opportunities for being and acting? According to Taylor (2009, 59), we assume „the basic premise that an active individual exists in a universe full of questions, questions to which our framing definitions provide answers, which form the horizon in the light of which we know where we stand and what the implications of things are. Accordingly, stable identities are only possible if people „can define the horizons of the important and the unimportant, the valuable and the noble or the trivial and the ugly etc.“ Such landscapes represent substantial ethical conceptions (‚frames‘) that contain a (…) blueprint of what matters, what is important“ (Rosa 2016, 227). They are ethical because they contain moral value judgements that form entire ethical systems within which the perception of all things in space is determined.
Text: © Stefan Applis (2020)
Photography: © Stefan Applis (2017)
References
Taylor, C. (2016). Quellen des Selbst. Die Entstehung der neuzeitlichen Identität. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. [Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press.]
Stefan Applis | Spaces, Places & Practices 