The incommensurability of making

Abstract

What is the incommensurability of making? How and under what circumstances can craft production be seen as a practice of care, a kind of love? And, how does this inversion of careful and caring labor become a method of hope? These questions emerged through my mentor-apprenticeship as an artist-anthropologist with the master coppersmith artisan, Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas (1926-2014) and his sons in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, Mexico. Reflecting upon this fieldwork, this article approaches the concept of incommensurability topologically winding through defining making as a continuum of art and craft; proposing artisan agency-ing, crafting care, labor and love; to how making becomes a method of hope. The incommensurability of making is a model of production that matters beyond measure that resists neoliberalism and global capitalist markets despite operating within these structures. Incommensurability challenges homogenizing dominant concepts of value and confronts the positional problematics of interpretation, quantification and measurement of labor and productivity.