Thanks to his studies in microscopic anatomy on a dissected hand, in the early Nineteenth Century Filippo Pacini managed to identify a new type of tactile corpuscle with the ability to absorb both the intentionality and receptivity of the brain. Present within our bodies, these organelles serve to transform the nervous impulses from the brain into stimuli resulting in muscle contraction, and consequently in the movement of our limbs. The study of these kinaesthetic receptors has contributed to determining, in scientific terms, the intrinsic connection between brain and hand, elevating the hand to a focal role within the human cognitive structure – it is in fact able to read and decipher surroundings, interpret thought, formalise gesture and incorporate language.

Understanding the “sensitive intelligence” of the hand was a subject of keen interest among philosophers even in antiquity. In more recent times, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida commented on Martin Heidegger’s thoughts concerning the hand and its ability to relate to thought, concluding that it is reductive to classify it as a mere prehensile organ. Derrida underlined the parallel roles played by hand and intellect in normal activities such as organising, understanding, conceiving matter and ideas – a correspondence which attains its highest expression in the connection between language and gesture. We are all in fact aware of how the manual capacity of the body can translate thought into drawing or writing, as well as in movements which characterise non-verbal communication.

The manual experience we have acquired over the centuries has enabled us to shift from a cultural evolution connected to the formation of language, to a technical evolution based on the development of advanced systems. From the Twentieth Century development of increased automation to the digital technologies and artificial intelligence of today, the tendency to regard intellectual and manual work as separate has brought about a transformation of the condition of homo faber which has paved the way towards a radical change of course – one which the American sociologist Richard Sennett considers to be a progressive loss of touch with reality.

Beginning in the 1960s, artists such as Ketty La Rocca, Giuseppe Penone and Yvonne Rainer explored different ways of reinterpreting artistic, technical and cultural conventions, broadening the ongoing debate regarding form, freeing the body, thought and identity. Their treatment of the human hand as a radically separate entity from any possible interpretative function has elevated the idea of “sensitive body” to a level of untarnished purity, a matrix of the minimal and primitive gesture – once more giving a central role to the intelligent complicity between subject and object, inner and outer, Man and Nature. (lp)