INFO


“Mapping Care” is a collaborative/interactive publication that invites the viewer to unfold the different kinds of care staff members of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie utilise.  The project is accompanied by a book-binding table where conversations will start and books will be bound, investigating what holds a space in ways that bricks and concrete couldn’t.  Walls become paper, intentions smell of ink and glue, threads or staples suggest a new form.

I invite hands to fold, cut, glue and bind, until we have made thought tangible.
Bookbinding Table
 The table was specially made for the graduation and will be donated afterwards to the Bookbinding Workshop at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie



The Hands That Form(ed) You 
An interactive publication and research project that began as a contribution to loVe making, the 2026 edition of Rietveld Uncut, an annual exhibition in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Responding to the theme of love as a creative act and site of resistance, the project maps out care through everyday gestures, mutual support, and the work of many hands.  
Structured as a map, this edition brings together contributions from staff members across the academy — teachers, workshop technicians, cleaning management, IT staff, concierges, canteen workers, and facilities staff — who shape the institution in both visible and invisible ways, sustaining the everyday conditions through which students learn, work, gather, and belong. Through texts, conversations, images, and other forms of contribution, The Hands That Form(ed) You traces and archives personal testimonies, memories, and everyday acts of care. 



Hands — holding, making, repairing, maintaining, carrying, guiding — lead the reader through diverse perspectives, suggesting how care can look, feel, and take shape through acts that might often remain unnoticed. Emphasising care as enacted through bodies, gestures, and labour in contrast to the theoretical and often institutionalised framework in which it exists, the publication foregrounds its tangible, lived reality and necessity.
ELEKTRA
TATALIA-ALOUPI