String Figures / Fadenspiele

Stretched between eight fingers and two thumbs, sometimes between teeth and toes, loops of string make shapes. String figures can do many things: they tell stories, they pass the time, they make the unsayable showable, they connect people. As one of humanity’s oldest cultural practices, they have inspired artists, performers, ethnologists, and theorists. String figures have been studied as an aesthetic practice, collected as artifacts, and considered as a non-Western way of thinking.