More repair

"For many, replacing a broken object with something new is often the faster and cheaper alternative to fixing it, but a group of neighbors in the small borough of Willimantic, Connecticut, decided it didn’t have to be that way. Three years ago, they started a program to keep salvageable goods from landfills by harnessing the community’s collective skills to fix them"

The article is here, with photos...

Extreme Mending

Superpsyched to see this post from the Cooper Hewitt museum

Brown, Susan. "Extreme Mending." Cooperhewitt.org. 6 Nov 2012; 17 Oct 2016. http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2012/11/06/extreme-mending/

Repair rights

Another one for the file on care and repair...this time addressing manufacturers' interests in keeping users from fixing their products...

Matchar, Emily. "The fight for the 'right to repair'. Smithsonian.com. 13 Jul 2016. 13 Jul 2016.

Fixing books

When you start to notice something suddenly it's everywhere. Here's another piece on repair, this time on books, by Christopher Jobson from Colossal (The Ingenuity and Beauty of Creative Parchment Repair in Medieval Books, Nov 7 2014; 10 Jun 2016.)  A quick peek at the Erik Kwakkel's blog about medieval manuscripts suggests theres' more to learn there...

More maintenance

I didn't love Interstellar, but it did strike a chord with me.

The film's long set-up describes a world where no chances can be taken because society can no longer afford them. Being part of a generation that was too late for the babyboomers' party and always knew it would be in charge of the clean up, I saw something painfully familiar in the story where characters were encouraged to go into farming and discouraged from breaking new ground through exploration.

Maybe that's what has me following all this stuff on maintenance and repair (which I've tagged this and other recent posts with). If you Google images of 'maintenance' you get hundreds of faceless drones like those below> they generally hold hand tools, but some of them have wrenches and computer keyboards, implying that a wrench is used to keep a computer up. Clearly, the world is screwed.

What you find when you look for 'maintenance' online...

Either way, I had the same sort of grim recognition when I read Laura Bliss' essay in the Atlantic's 'Citylab' ("How 'Maintainers,' not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn", April 16, 2016). So I wanted to add it to this list...

At some point we'll get to how all this fits together. For now...there's a clean up on aisle three...

This might be going too far....

Mitchell, Nancy. "Broken is Beautiful: The Japanese Tradition That Makes Broken Things Even Better than Brand New". Apartment Therapy. 19 May 2016. 6 Jun 2016. http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/broken-is-beautiful-kintsugi-makes-broken-things-even-better-231069?crlt.pid=camp.pEvil9o3aFse

Article identifies the practice as kintsugi.

More on Mending

Wanted to add this piece by Felicia x on Visible Mending to the list of things on repair I've put here...will have to go back and make a tag for them now...

More about care...

...trying to keep track of stories about mending and repair (less about curation, please). See an earlier post on mending.

Here's one, "Preserving what is valued", from University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum...reviewed by Allison Meier for Hyperallergic...

Michael Swaine: "Mending for the People" Tenderloin National Forest, San...

Some time ago, it occurred to me that a good way to teach some of the fundamental skills that are part of a BFA Foundations program might be to use repair as a focus for a project. (This is an idea I have talked about with artist H. John Thompson a little.)



It would require knowledge of materials and assembly logics, as well as careful measurement and fabrication. One can imagine a number of conceptually engaging approaches to repair that students might take.



I've been making note of examples of work like this, but I I thought this was an interesting take on the subject. Perhaps I'll keep track of examples here, and I invite your suggestions...