Repair — Making Art, Mind, Body and Spirit
While the dominant discourse of our modern culture is about driving consumption, there’s a groundswell challenging the buy - break - trash - repurchase paradigm.
Extensive and substantive work about Repair and Maintenance has been underway for some time in many quarters, from academia to theology to art. The below references are the tip of the iceberg, most with extensive bibliographies reaching far into their respective fields.
The list below is decidedly incomplete and very much still in progress, but is nevertheless offered to help people new to thinking about Repair begin to find material meaningful to their lines of inquiry.
Please suggest additions!
Finally: Separating resources and people in categories is antithetical to the mindset from which repair emerges.
Art, Mind, Body & Spirit over here, and Scholarship and Research over there, and Worldwide Initiatives somewhere else… It’s all of a kind.
And yet … sometimes categories makes it easier to find things.
Need to figure out a fix for this.
Craftsmanship Magazine — The Art of Repair
Fall 2023 Issue
”In a culture addicted to novelty and fast profits, the humble art of repair has declined almost to the point of extinction. But it’s not too late: In this issue, we delve into the history of planned obsolescence, and the reemerging ethos of restoration. From the patient hands of watchmakers, piano restoration experts, and veteran appliance repairmen to the story of a young French woman who got her country to ban planned obsolescence, we’ll explore what it really means to create, maintain—and truly value—a world built to last.” Beautiful and elegant stories, videos, podcasts and notes recounting the many ways people repair in this world.
https://craftsmanship.net/issue/fall-2023/
Kate Sekules
“Writer, historian, teacher, and lifelong mender, whose mission is to spread the mend, foster community, and get us all codesigning our own wardrobes. I am a professor of fashion history at Pratt Institute, teach my new class "Mending Fashion" at Parsons NYC, and speak, tutor, and give papers regularly….” See About for so much more.
Author of “Mend, a Refashioning and Mending Manifesto”
Video of talk at at NewLab, Brooklyn NY, on February 17, 2023 (26 min): Mending
“Mending is no trend, it is a way of seeing…Visible mending is co-design, putting me in touch with the original maker…The opposite of hate is mending.”
https://visiblemending.com/, https://visiblemending.org/, https://linktr.ee/visiblemend
Mending Church
"We are committed to repair.”
Through mending, an inter- and intra-personal exploration of repair in the many dimensions brokenness can manifest. Workshops, retreats, and sharing reflections along the way.
“Our work falls in two general areas: Mending and Indigo. Each is led with an awareness that these embodied skills cannot be taught without acknowledging the history of what has come before. In fact, we find that textile history is a powerful way into conversations about racism, sexism, homophobia and the powers that tear our communities apart. We learn with our hands what we long for in our lives: we are all worthy of repair.”
“There is not much reason to mend a worn sock. Socks are cheap. Overnight delivery can get me a new pair by the time I wake up tomorrow. Darning a sock takes time. And yet, I’ve made the commitment to slow down, stitch more and teach others as I take up mending as a spiritual practice.” From “Spirituality of Mending” for Religion News Service
https://mendingchurch.com/
reThink Repair
By Faith Hanna, Kathryn Hyde and Tam Putnam
“reThinkRepair spotlights the world of repair in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond: the shop owners, workers, thinkers, and activists who make fixing their business.”
”In photos, shopkeepers show off equipment and techniques. In interviews, they talk about their work process, personal history, and the future of their trade.” The proposed book “features proprietors of 50+ repair shops—booming businesses as well as beloved establishments in danger of disappearing. Woven among the portraits are conversations about sustainability, right-to-repair legislation, and small business resilience. These interviews underline the idea that repair doesn’t just restore broken objects, it also keeps material out of landfill, saves money, and supports vibrant communities.”
https://www.bookrethinkrepair.com/
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
As part of the proposal for an exhibition entitled Care which “would zero in on pure maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art,” Ukeles published the seminal Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969! A review in Hyperallergic of the 2017 retrospective of her work at Queens Museum describes the relevance of the Manifesto relative to her and others’ art. The Manifesto is more and more frequently cited in essays and articles about maintenance, stewardship, repair and related (e.g., “Maintenance and Care”).
Eternally Yours — UK — Somerset House, London. An exhibition exploring ideas around care, repair and healing. “Showcasing diverse examples of creative reuse, from historical samples of the Japanese art of Kintsugi and Boro, which embrace upcycling and repurposing, to works from contemporary artists who put repair at the heart of their practice, Eternally Yours explores the unexpectedly hopeful and healing stories that repair reveals. In light of the recent global pandemic, the exhibition seeks to unpack how ‘repair’ can guide both our individual and collective healing.” https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/eternally-yours
Lovely video, less than one minute.
Artist interviews in TOAST Magazine
unbroken.solutions — UK — Mark Phillips “is a photographer based near London, UK. His photography is largely focussed on ‘constructive’ stories about people and groups taking action to address societal problems; emphasis being on the environment and sustainability. Current projects focus on the importance of repair and reuse as a response to waste and creating a sustainable future.” https://unbroken.solutions/
Repair Acts — UK — “Fostering restorative cultures by connecting past stories, with what we do today, to how we envision the future.” “Established in 2018, Repair Acts is a ‘mothership’ entity a number of projects. Currently the programme is working … on exploring rural mending and fixing cultures in the midlands county of Westmeath through Repair Acts, Ireland.”
https://repairacts.net/
Repair Acts, Ireland — Ireland — "Repair Acts, Ireland aims to foster vibrant and restorative repair cultures in Ireland by connecting past stories about mending and fixing things, with what we do today, to how we envision the future. Over 2022 we will be working with local communities, repair enthusiast and experts, DIY hobbyists and passionate amateurs to build the people’s online photo archive of everyday repaired objects. Documenting and mapping how we used to repair things, with our “Right to Repair”, we will be creating Ireland’s first “Repair Declaration” and speculating on future directions, we will be creating a series of new art works and site-based installation."
https://www.repairacts.ie/
Design for Repair: Things Can Be Fixed
By Derrick Mead
Published in 2015
Design File - Publishers
45 pages
Repair is a design constraint and an outcome of product design. It’s also a practical activity performed—or not—on designed objects. Similar skills and understanding are required to design and fix things well, but these shared capacities are applied to very different practical ends. Design for Repair investigates the historical and current state of repair in material culture as it applies specifically to product designers.
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/publications/design-for-repair/
Make Do and Mend: The Art of Repair — US — Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York. Post in Scrap Stories, a blog dedicated to exploring sustainable textiles and fashion: An overview of attitudes toward mending in the last two centuries, and mending’s relevance to contemporary fashion and the environment.
https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2017/01/03/make-do-and-mend-the-art-of-repair/
Repair and Design Futures — US — Rhode Island School of Design Museum, October 2018 - June 2019. This exhibition and programming series, Repair and Design Futures, investigates mending as material intervention, metaphor, and call to action. Spanning the globe and more than three centuries, these objects reveal darns, patches, and stabilized areas that act as springboards to considering socially engaged design thinking today. Repair invites renewed forms of social exchange and offers alternative, holistic ways of facing environmental and social breakdown.
https://risdmuseum.org/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/repair-and-design-futures
Kader Attia
“His socio-cultural research has led Kader Attia to the notion of Repair, a concept he has been developing philosophically in his writings and symbolically in his oeuvre as a visual artist. With the principle of Repair being a constant in nature — thus also in humanity —, any system, social institution or cultural tradition can be considered as an infinite process of Repair, which is closely linked to loss and wounds, to recuperation and re-appropriation. Repair reaches far beyond the subject and connects the individual to gender, philosophy, science, and architecture, and also involves it in evolutionary processes in nature, culture, myth and history.”
http://kaderattia.de/
"At the core of the exhibition, a key group of artworks explore the idea of repair as both a physical and symbolic act, relating to individual as well as social trauma. These varied works draw on Attia’s extensive research and personal exchanges with an expansive range of practitioners, including traditional healers, neurologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, ethno-musicologists, surgeons and traumatised individuals. Deeply affective and sometimes troubling, these artworks challenge our conventional ideas of wholeness and injury, authenticity and repair, belonging and otherness. They reflect the artist’s belief that ‘our world today cannot be understood without taking into account the psychological and emotional aspects of society’"
Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion, Hayward Gallery, London, February to May 2019
Fix It Workshop — UK — a delightful and inspiring blog by Matt Marchant
"The diary of a tinkerer: Stories, advice, tips and sometimes the odd failure to inspire your own repair." "I love repairing things and hate throwing things away that can be saved. There’s far too much waste in the world. Many things that can sometimes appear unrepairable, are indeed repairable, with a little tinkering. I want to encourage people who doubt their own ability to repair their things, to give repair a go."
https://fixitworkshop.co.uk/
Fixation
Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet
By Sandra Goldmark
Published in 2020
Island Press
197 pp.
Fixation “takes readers on a quest to radically reimagine what a healthy relationship with our stuff might look like - for individuals hungry for a way forward, for businesses looking for a path to sustainable growth, and for everyone committed to building the personal, social and political changes that will move us to a more sustainable and equitable circular economy.” https://sandragoldmark.com/
Mending Hearts - How a ‘repair economy’ creates a kinder, more caring community
By Katherine Wilson, The Conversation, June 12, 2019.
"Repair is discouraged by unavailable replacement parts, glued assemblies and tamper-proof cases that are difficult to open. So we discard things rather than fix them. Much research suggests this harms more than the natural environment. It also affects our mental environment. There’s a connection between the way society treats material objects and the way it treats people."
https://theconversation.com/mending-hearts-how-a-repair-economy-creates-a-kinder-more-caring-community-113547
The Radical Repair Workshop
The Radical Repair Workshop is "a traveling art project by artist Julia Gartrell explor[ing] contemporary relationships to repair through a sculptural lens." The Workshop "is a pop-up art experience housed inside a vintage 1966 Frolic camper. The project encourages participants and viewers to consider their relationship to mending, sentimental objects, single-use items, and radical (potentially non-functional) modes of repair."
https://radicalrepairworkshop.com/
MEND: The Work of Repair — US — James Watrous Gallery, Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, August 18 - November 5, 2023.
"There is so much in the wider world that needs repair right now. It can feel impossible to respond in a meaningful way, or even identify the tools and skills that could make a difference. But small, close-to-home efforts do matter. Whether it's fixing a wheelchair, restoring a wetland, mending pants or mending a heart, the quiet work of repair sends out ripples of hope. ...We hope this exhibition will inspire you to consider the repairs that could be made in your own lives and communities, one step -- or one stitch -- at a time."
https://www.wisconsinacademy.org/gallery/mend-work-repair
Repair Revolution!
March 3 - October 15, 2023
Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich Switzerland
"Repairing is no longer merely a last resort but an important cultural, social, and economic practice that offers an alternative to our throwaway society. The exhibition Repair Revolution! presents the vision of a repair society and the role that design can play in getting there.”
https://museum-gestaltung.ch/en/ausstellung/repair-revolution/
Kintsugi
"Golden joinery" "... the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise." (wikipedia) — also: boro, wabi-sabi, shibui, and mottainai