Abstract This essay argues that Maren Hassinger repositions the entwined histories of ‘hand’ and floor by translating post-minimalism’s floor logic into the public language of site. Working with salvaged steel cable that masquerades as fibre, Hassinger exploits substitution — of fibre by metal, studio by landscape — to bind hand, process, and place. Read against Los Angeles assemblage and process art, works from Interlock and Numbers 1–5 to the commissions Twelve Trees and Forest complicate minimalism’s withdrawal of the hand while refusing craft’s domestication. Her sculptures carry the emotional timbre of nature yet remain ‘strapped to culture’, engaging infrastructural forms and urban geographies. Rather than an eco-elegy, the installations stage a poised precarity whose serial, near-vegetal units register both the afterlife of industrial remainders and the potential for collective agency. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s notion of landscape as ‘character’ and opacity, the essay shows how Hassinger entangles nature and culture to produce an alternative civic ground.
