MA Social Design — Graduation 2026

Remembering Hands

Remembering Hands is an art project and an immersive archive created in response to systematic erasure of women’s labor and knowledge (emotional, intellectual, creative, and physical) from institutional history. While essential to the fabric of society, domestic labor is frequently left invisible and undervalued in official records. This project serves not just as an alternative archive, but as a mnemonic protest — a direct resistance against forgetting. It challenges viewers to reconsider what we define as history and tradition when certain voices are routinely left out of them. Through multiple workshops, in collaboration with different institutions, participants wrote their memories of women whose knowledge was passed down to them inside the domestic space. Based on these stories they sculpted clay hands to commemorate women whose domestic work and wisdom shaped their lives.

from personal to collective

The research began by archiving my grandmother’s family collection of textile handcrafts, with an emphasis on documenting knowledge that institutions rarely recognize. Through intimate conversations and working with textile materials, I explored how handcrafts can “hold” memory. From this emerged the idea of creating a collective database of materialized memories that immortalizes women’s domestic labor. Mentioned repeatedly in conversations with my grandmother, the practice of Prelo (collective crafting and labor inside households) inspired the choice of workshop as a format for building the archive.

building an archive

Inspired by craft as carrier of memory, and Balkan practice of Prelo workshop was chosen as a way to build this alternative archive. Some workshops were held with friends in domestic spaces, while some were held with general public in collaboration with multiple institutions in Zagreb (MaMa Multimedia Institute, Centar Pažnje and Women's Antifascist Network of Zagreb).

archival code

The key to systematizing this archive, which allows for easier cross-linking of its elements (clay sculptures, catalog, poster, stories), is a specific archival code. Beyond the workshop and the author’s initials, this code also communicates the relationship between the creator and the person to whom the sculpture is dedicated. In doing so, it aims to highlight relationality as an essential segment of domestic epistemology and address the failure of dominant historiographical methods to account for the social context of objects.

sculpted stories

P5-G-SJ

I dedicate this sculpture to my late grandma (‘baba’) Milka. The only memories I have of her are a broom (I assume I don’t need to explain), collecting bottles, and hard, salty cheese. In a society where people are ashamed of “lower jobs,” she survived on a pension of a few hundred kunas – barely enough for food, not enough for a normal life. I remember how modestly, with her calm, rough hands and a smile on her face, she would collect bottles (that was her “hobby”). From the money she gathered, she managed once a week to set aside a few kunas to buy her and me a triangle of our favorite salty cheese. Every day, she would give us each one tiny, thin slice. Although at the time it seemed like very little and I wanted more, it taught me modesty, patience, and boundaries. She taught me not to be ashamed of any kind of work, that nothing done honestly is shameful, that small things have value, and that love can be shown through small things, details, and consistency – not just through abundance.

P5-M-MĐ

I dedicate this sculpture to Mom because she works with clay herself, handling it very gently and with great devotion, just as she does with her children.

Credits: Sculptors: Karla Perica, Mihael Diklić, Ana Stakor, Jan Bantić, Monika Vodopija, Nikolas Pfanner, Tina Tadić, Jan Težak, Hrvoje Kožić, Iva Milas, Tana Jeić, Hana Matejašić, Heda Nikolić, Marina Škrabalo, Zrinka Pukljak, Elvira Belić, Maša Žarnić, Vanja Nikolić, Ivana Jelača, Zdenka Matijašević, Barbara Kurtov, Mara Đukez, Sara Panjkota, Lucija Marenjak, Marija Krstanović, Sanja Junaković, Jelena Orešković. Thanks to friends, family and acquaintances who helped, participated and inspired. <3

Edit Delete