sylwia@monviso-institute.orgForming Relationships — Building One’s Own Tool as a Holistic Practice
Artisanal knife and spoon making through embodied circular design
Knives are among the oldest tools of humankind, dating to around 2.6 million years ago. Alongside fire, they mark the beginning of our technological and cultural becoming. Emerging from early gestures of shaping, scraping, cutting, and scooping, the knife shares deep functional roots with another primal, 20,000-year-old utensil, the spoon.
These simple extensions of the hand arose to meet the basic needs of transforming and sustaining life. This course opens up a dialogue with human origins — with the elemental forces that mediate change: fire, water, earth, air, and the human hand.
Crafting a knife articulates division, edge, and intention, requiring an engagement with force, precision, and control. Crafting a spoon foregrounds containment rather than division, emphasizing support, transfer, and proximity to the body. Crafting these tools will embed you in a relationship to self, to place, to material, to the long lineage of tools that have shaped how humans live, work, cook, hunt, care, and share.
This course frames tool-making not only as forging or carving, but as forming: an act of arranging materials, gestures, techniques, stories, and places into a coherent whole. Forging speaks to intensity, heat, force, and transformation — especially in steel and blade. Forming opens the field toward pattern, relation, rhythm, and balance — allowing knife and spoon, fire and wood, cutting and holding to coexist within one systemic practice, much as they have coexisted since the earliest human toolkits.
From analogy to ontology — the Knife as metaphor and teacher
A knife is not only a tool; it is a metaphor for discernment — the capacity to cut through confusion, to separate, to clarify, to reveal form within the raw. To build one’s own knife is to reclaim the means of shaping the world. It is a systemic act: shaping the tool that will shape many other actions and decisions.
Forging the knife is an engagement with hardness, resistance, and irreversibility. Steel remembers heat and force. It demands attention and decisiveness. In this sense, forging is an education in commitment: once a cut is made, it cannot be undone.
From cutting to containing — the spoon as companion tool
Wooden spoon carving shapes through patience, grain, and listening. It introduces a softer, slower, but no less precise mode of composing material — one oriented toward nourishment, containment, caring and sharing.
Here, forming becomes explicit: the bowl balances volume and thickness; the handle follows the hand while maintaining grain continuity. The spoon teaches continuity rather than separation, flow rather than incision.
Knife and spoon together form a relational pair — two gestures of human life held in productive tension, rooted in a shared origin yet unfolding into complementary ways of engaging the world.
Course structure
Virtual preparatory design phase (3 sessions)
Session 1:
Forming relationships? Introduction to the philosophy and ontology of tools — Why make your own knife and spoon?
Knife and spoon as ancient, complementary gestures: cutting and holding, discernment and care.
Session 2:
Place-based material sourcing and on-site camping — preparing for fieldwork and encounters with landscape and practice.
Session 3:
Design ideation — blade geometry, 3D modelling, steel selection for pre-ordering, sketching, prototyping/mockuping, handle ergonomics, sheath; spoon morphology and material choice.
On-site immersive phase (5 days)
• Day 1
Arrival and orientation
Philosophical and personal grounding; introduction to place; knives, spoons and forming tools in use, ; knife–spoon lineage and the Nessmuk as a hybrid origin; blade and spoon shapes and their functional aesthetics; materials and tools familiarization. Social evenig around dinner.
• Day 2
Systemic Cycles “materials collection and place connection”
Collecting disused steel from mountain farms (literally); meeting trees and their wood; touching dried local wood types; dialogue with craftspeople, farmers and landscapes; reflecting on material stories and lived practices; material selection and workshop preparation. Social evening around dinner (fire, pizza oven)
• Day 3
Composing, forging, carving, hardening (shared foundation)
- Knife path:
transforming recycled, new knifesteel, and old tools-steel into new blades; learning tempering, shaping, hardening in the furnace with 1200°C, testing, and sharpening as embodied inquiry.
- Spoon path:
browsing and selecting the spoon prototype, rough-cut and start of carving
• Day 4
Parallel crafting paths
Knife path: refining blade ergonomics; rockwell testing; shaping wooden handles; crafting leather sheaths with hemp yarn, or vegan Paulownia wood sheaths with fish protein glues and magnet holders.
Spoon path: carving wooden spoons; working with grain, bowl geometry, and ergonomics; sanding, polishing, finishing for food use.
• Day 5
Finishing, Reflection, Exhibition
- Sharpening, oiling, engraving; presenting knives and spoons side by side;
- Shared cooking and dinner at the campus fireplace - using your own newly crafted tools and group reflection on the course learnings, tools ontology, systemic cycles and embodied experiences
Dates and places
A virtual theory and preparatory meeting about two weeks before (date to be announced)
On-site immersive phase is 01-07 August 2026 (01 and 07 August are arrival/departure days)
Location: MonViso Institute, Serre Lamboi, 12030 Ostana, Italy
Meet the Forming Relations guides, MVI Design Associates:
Tobias Luthe, MVI Founding Director, ETH DRRS Program Director, Systemic Cycles Co-founder
Sylwia Orczykowska, ETH DRRS Communication and Art Designer, Art Now Founder
For whom?
...
DRRS elective?
Yes, counting for 2 ECTS if pre-conditioned MOOC#1 has been finished and if accompanied by a written-graphical report with a potential selection as a DRRS blog publication, plus your personal learning reflection, to be submitted after the course.
Pricing
Regular course price - 00 €
DRRS CAS alumni price - 00 €
Bike rental (in case of Systemic Cycles by bike) and taxi pickup are included in the price.
Financial support may be available on a case-by-case basis (upon request).
Additional costs:
• accommodation....tents....
Required preconditions
Please apply by 31 March, 2025 using this form with:
– a short statement of motivation,
– a brief résumé of your education and work experience,
– your age,
– proof of ETH DRRS MOOC#1 participation for the DRRS alumni conditions,
- proof of accident insurance,
– your expectations.
Please note that the number of seats is limited. Final participants will be selected based on a statement of motivation and fulfillment of the required preconditions.
Do you have questions? Please email sylwia@monviso-institute.org.