The HANDMADE team, led by Lambros Malafouris and based in the Institute of Archaeology, consists of junior and senior researchers, doctoral students, academics and artists. The core team is advised and assisted by an academic board of external collaborators.
Our research team is cross-disciplinary bringing together a variety of expertise and bridging academic perspectives. Importantly, the philosophy of the HANDMADE project is participatory. We study handmaking with the potters, by means of their bodies and skills. That means that the potters and ceramists who participate in the study are actively working with our research team, experimenting with multisensory forms of intervention and representation. They are encouraged to reflect on the process, look at our videos and in general play an active role in the interpretation of the visual and experiential data captured in different transitional phases. We are trying to learn from the potters the language of clay, hoping to reach a level of mutual involvement or coupling between the observer and the observed that will allow us to understand how we should be thinking about the processes we study, what questions we could be asking, where we should be looking. As a consequence of that, the design of our specific methodologies is constantly evolving during the course of the project in conversation with the potters we meet and the techniques we record.
