Revealed hands I

Since 2010, Oloop authoring group has been researching and developing projects, actions, and products, with which it revived awareness of the public about the importance of textile handicraft and its influence on individual’s well-being.

The idea for the project Revealed Hands originated from its need to extend its operation and therefore the concept of the contemporary design by adding a socially engaged note.

The project’s title alluded to the women’s covered faces, who communicate with the world through their loving, skilful, and diligent hands.

The project Revealed hands was intended for a group of women living in Jesenice – immigrants from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Kosovo and who were brought to Slovenia by different life stories, coincidences, and conditions in home country.

Women came from different cultural environments that are extremely rich in the field of textile cultural heritage. At the same time, in some places of these countries, the traces of a thousand-year-old textile industry remained intact until the present day.

Together with the project participants the design team co-created a collection of contemporarily designed hand-made textile products, which on the aesthetic and content basis relied on textile cultural heritage of the vulnerable group, and benefited from Slovenian tradition. Both of the traditions were freshly and contemporarily intertwined and redesigned in the spirit of time, and are therefore appropriate for a modern human being.

At the exhibition with the same name at Slovene Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana, products, participants’ portraits, and impressions from creative processes were presented.