The publication accompanies the exhibition at Museum VILLA STUCK and expands on its central question: hands are anatomical organs and political forms, tools of work, care, violence, repair, invention, and solidarity. At a time when machines simulate language, writing, and thought, the exhibition asks what expression and agency might mean today, and how forms of social coexistence can be imagined.

The hands gathered in the exhibition are not only human hands, but also paws, claws, fins, talons, and other grasping organs. Together they form a society of hands—a parliament without speeches, in which agency is shared and intelligence emerges through making rather than mastery.

The book develops these ideas further in a curatorial essay, inviting us to reflect on cooperation, care, and peace, and to reopen the space of social imagination.

Chus Martinez is the Head of the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Academy of Arts and Design HGK in Basel. She has held leading positions at MACBA, dOCUMENTA (13), and El Museo del Barrio. Her most recent internationally acclaimed projects include the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2026) and the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2025).