Touch Machine
Designer Soraia Gomes Teixeira’s Touch Machine investigates human relationships with touch (image: Dinis Santos).
“We usually touch each other’s hands, especially in Western culture where we greet each other with a handshake,” says Soraia Gomes Teixeira, a designer whose work investigates human relationships with touch. “However, when this gesture is decontextualised, it becomes something intimate to touch someone’s hand, even if it someone that we know.”
Teixeira’s Public Devices for Therapy (2020), a series of bright orange structures that resemble the fitness equipment offered in public parks, encouraged users to experience this kind of decontextualised touch by slipping their arms into iron cuffs and joining hands. “We need touch to feel protected, cared for and loved,” Teixeira says, discussing the vital role that touch plays in child development. “The skin, the contact, the squeeze, it’s all important for solid growth.” But touch is essential for adult health too, and Teixeira’s designs prompt reflections about the rigid societal rules around physical closeness that are imposed on our bodies after adolescence.
The bodysuit features gloves which are unlined, so that people’s hands fall straight through the outlines and onto the wearer’s body (image: Dinis Santos).
Her latest project, Touch Machine, is a large violet bodysuit covered in oversized green gloves which is hooked onto an orange frame to allow people to step inside it. The suit was made by Teixeira’s parents, who are both seamsters, and uses a vibrant colour scheme to contrast against the usual grey of machinery and create an object that lies somewhere between a garment and a piece of equipment. The wearer’s body is covered entirely from head to toe, and each glove is unlined so that people’s hands fall straight through their outlines and onto their body. The Touch Machine offers a variety of experiences: wearing the suit and receiving anonymous touch; slipping your hands inside the gloves to touch a person’s body without them knowing who you are; or watching these interactions unfold on the sidelines.
“The hands were placed randomly but I wanted to form a kind of path throughout the whole body,” Teixeira says. While some of the gloves are placed in relatively neutral locations such as the back of the head or the upper arm, others are placed in more risqué spots such as the lower back and the upper thigh. “The gloves give you access to practically the whole body because by going through the glove your hand can explore the whole arm or the whole leg,” she says. Teixeira wanted to explore the power imbalance between the toucher, who can choose where their hands go, and the wearer who cannot. This dynamic is more complex than it first appears; for example, in the feedback Teixeira collected after an exhibition of the Touch Machine, one person wondered whether it was more vulnerable to touch or to be touched. “I felt exposed standing outside and touching,” they wrote.
The Touch Machine covers the whole body from head to toe, creating opportunities for users to anonymously give and receive touch (image: Dinis Santos).
Many people who participated in the exhibition at INSTITUTO, a cultural space in Porto, only felt comfortable touching people they knew. “It was almost as if a stranger’s body was a space without permission, even though the machine gave it,” Teixeira says. This hesitation was contrasted against a toddler who didn’t go inside the machine, but nevertheless went around the room touching everybody and inviting them to touch his mother. Teixeira herself went inside the machine and was touched by a group of her students from the University of Minho who fearfully stroked her with their fingertips while other people she didn’t know squeezed and massaged her more openly. “When I entered the machine and was touched by people who are with me every day, my students, I thought, ‘If I weren't in here, these are people who would never touch me,’” she says, highlighting the way in which hierarchies influence our experience of touch. “This idea of being close to others but physically distant confuses me.”
When people first started using the machine they were anxious and doubtful, but after a few tries they relaxed and became bolder. The machine provided a new sensory understanding of each other, with people’s loved ones remarking that they didn’t know their friend had such stiff legs or such a round head. “There were prejudices that we have about touch that are quickly dispelled,” Teixeira says, explaining that it successfully acted as a mediator which made people feel safe. “When people came out of the machine, they said that they felt massaged and cared for.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown