5th of December,
I just visited the school again this morning. The way the college is functioning at the moment, the prospects are very bleak. I need a narrative. From the students, from the school, from Uganda, From Africa. And no sooner as I have written this down, I want to retract it again; Ultimately the masters project is about touch. The awareness of Touch. Conscious touch. The immediacy of Touch. And getting side tracked by the fact that research is taken place in Africa. Yet, it is impossible to by pass the fact that things are here so radically different. That, in my Western opinion, there is so much need. The students live and work like caterpillars, and with a little change, a little help, they could live and study and work like butterflies. I was reading an interesting article by Tanya Harrods, (Crafts Magazine June-July 2011 ), who was writing about a phenomena called : 'Maker Fares '.
These are creative fairs, where people not consume, but create . This has been happening in Europe , America, and, with a different twist, in Africa. Emeka Okafor, a leading Anglo- African thinker ,set out his aim to to create a 'maker philosophy' in Africa. On the 2010 Nairobi Faire, sixty young men and women were featured on 'Makers faire African's match -a- maker scheme., which aims to pair young innovators with venture capitalists. Perhaps this has not so much to do with touch. It is about being touched by an situation, and looking for possibilities for improvement.
Touch is about being touched by a situation and looking for possibilities for improvement. Touch is about not looking at things from a distance, not just listening or smelling, not just eating the matoke,
but engage, not just with an object, a person even, but with a situation, and become aware of the weight and shape of it, and make it part of your own experience ,before handing it back. To speak with Sennett, ' Presence can be registered simply by leaving a maker's mark'.
Perhaps, on my journey through Touch, this is the biggest lesson I have learned ; That Touch signifies immediate involvement. Looking is a passive act. Listening is untouchable. Taste possibly comes close to Touch , because to taste, one has to touch, but in a way this means taste is a secondary sense, and scent is equally untouchable, although this provokes the strongest memory.
Touch is the only sense which can also be applied to the heart, and therefore makes it the most precious of the senses.
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