Angelo Vignali, How to Raise a Hand published by Witty Books

How To Raise a Hand is a project that came about through the discovery of a box containing 313 black-and-white prints of Angelo Vignali’s father’s fingers, who passed away in 2018.

To re-establish a dialogue with his parent, the artist begins to work with these fragments of his hand. Moving between touch and vision, Vignali creates an intimacy that becomes tangible again through a collaboration between imagination and haptic perception. Something new emerges when he creates casts of his own hands: identical to his father’s, the wax replicas allow him to relive the sensation of his touch, embodied and amplified through the increasing number of these inanimate objects.

The work uses archival photography, performance and sculpture to explore themes of family, memory and loss. Identity distinguishes us from one another, making us biologically, psychologically and culturally unique and special.
But what if we are more alike than we can imagine? Is it possible that the dead live on in us, not only in our memories but physically embedded and reproduced through the shape of our bodies?