Stainless steel, Epoxy, silicone, wood and white porcelain

Variable dimensions, 2024-2025 

Exploring otherness through utensils for fictional hands without thumbs

What if we had no thumbs? What would our daily lives look like without the opposable thumb, without that small but crucial gesture of gripping? Despite its modest size, the thumb plays a central role in our existence—essential for countless technical achievements and marking a turning point in human evolution. A different hand would have likely reshaped the entire narrative of our world.

‘No Spare Wheels’ is a speculative exploration of this fictional possibility. Taking the form of a collection of handcrafted eating utensils, this project invites us to play a different hand. Using these objects questions the hidden mechanics of everyday gestures and their evolution, while each element becomes an invitation to reapproach our relationship to the body, the objects we live with, and otherness itself.

The project unfolds through a series of intimate and humorous dinner parties where participants navigate these new forms of cutlery, discovering alternative ways to nourish themselves and each other. These gatherings become spaces of collective fumbling and shared discovery, where the simple act of eating transforms into a performance of adaptation. Through the playful struggle offered by the utensils, conversations naturally emerge about difference, belonging, and the countless ways bodies move through the world.

Over time, ‘No Spare Wheels’ has become a compilation of stories, observations, and embodied insights gathered through this ongoing exploration. This growing archive weaves together diverse experiences of navigating the world differently, creating alternative knowledge that challenges assumptions about ability, normalcy, and the design of everyday life. The project offers not solutions, but invitations—to imagine, to fumble, to discover new forms of grace in unfamiliar movements.

A first taste.

The first dinner was organized in close collaboration with the Art x Science program of the University of Zurich and ZFV-Unternehmungen. Held at the Uniturm restaurant in Zurich, we invited 15 guests to experience the project and forget their thumbs for one evening.