Abstract This presentation reflects on an intercultural collaboration with Zambian artist Afulodidim Nikefolosi that led to the exhibition “Decolonial Love” and the short film "Decolonial Love?". Working as her assistant, co-author and artisan, I found myself literally “listening with my hands”: translating her concepts into masks, installations and moving-image works while confronting my own position as a white, middle-aged European man.

Through a series of practice-based vignettes (the Baobab portraits, the Masks series, and The Beads installation), I show how hand-based making can become a mode of decolonial listening. Rather than seeking transparency or explanation, this work engages Glissant’s “right to opacity”, Indigenous practices of refusal, and the discomfort of postcolonial encounter. The pieces require viewers to bend, peer, and negotiate fragile spaces; similarly, the process required me to negotiate miscommunication, white entitlement, and questions of authorship and value.

Analysing these processes, I propose “listening with the hands” as an artistic research method that:

- makes visible and sensible the usually unspoken dynamics of race, migration, and coloniality;

- explores the ineffable through embodied, affective registers that exceed verbal discourse;

- troubles the figure of the authoritative lone author by foregrounding asymmetrical, yet generative, collaboration.

Situated at the intersection of “making seeable and sayable”, “ineffable and endangered practices”, and “experimental methodologies”, the talk contributes a grounded, practice-led account of how artistic research can enact decolonial love as shared, risky making rather than abstract ideal—inviting others to consider how their own hands might learn to listen.