From Space To Place: The Department of Repair: Repairing as Place Making

Abstract

The Department of Repair is a 6 week project which ran in early 2015 at the Camberwell Space Gallery, Camberwell College of Arts. It is part of my practice based AHRC PhD research, RepairAbility: Repair as Pathway to Sustainability for Designers.

When a thing breaks, even if done deliberately, it calls itself to our attention, requests interaction, touch and communication. We must, if nothing else, sweep up the shards of a broken glass. Capitalist culture instructs us to discard and buy new, however, the act of repair protests against this, objects to it and demands a new route. Mal-disposal of things (broken or not) has lead to out-of-control materials leaching and leaking from landfill into natural systems, disrupting the eco-system. Things designed for obsolescence could be considered to have been ‘born bad’, and our discard practices reinforce this.

The dynamic force of damage generates space and opportunities for innovative (re)making on several levels. Through the making of The Department of Repair I explored this generative and creative space. Displaying, developing and testing both the material and immaterial manifestations of my practice through this project, and exploring those of others, the gallery became an extension of my own studio, a temporary learning site for myself and others and a public space for personal reflection. A discourse of matter and form, of community and social/human interaction, place and distributed knowledge, where a bricolage of agents, methods and materials come into play, came together in this temporary repair hub. Through this multidimensional conversation and a zero waste aim for the entire project, a conscious group anti-consumption stance was formed, making new narratives through repair, and a collaborative form of quiet activism.

Drawing on alternative and experimental pedagogies, I made (re)making opportunities for others: a series of workshops exploring repair practices as part of making in the practice of others. Although the broken thing comes negatively to human attention, un-othering it from the position of dirty or garbage through repair unsettles the one-way relationship of practitioner to thing or material and begins to teach the practitioner about its material self.

Repair promotes a convivial reconstruction of social and material tools and values, and the consequent redefinition of ownership and power. Stewart Brand states that to maintain or repair is to learn. I posit repair as a social learning as well as a material one.

A single repaired thing or act may seem insignificant. However, through visible process, material manifestations of repair give an elasticity, an agency beyond the individual. So where the Heideggerian broken object (disobedient, even if broken deliberately), calls itself to our attention, repair demands a new response where a bricolage of agents, methods, systems and materials create riotous and resilient new narratives for society.