THE VISIBILITY OF CARE AND REPAIR

The Visibility of Care and Repair

This presentation considers practices of care and repair in the built environment, suggesting that with increased visibility it becomes easier to choose, practice, and embrace the results of care work.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is well known for her art that makes care work visible. From her early “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” to her “Washing” performances and her residency with the NYC Department of Sanitation, Ukuleles has practiced upkeep as a form of intervention. Ukeles’ work invites viewers to consider maintenance practices that are often overlooked or undervalued, and to think about how our everyday lives are interconnected with the labor of others.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, along with other artists working in the vein known as Relational Aesthetics, emphasizes the importance of creating spaces that foster communication, interaction, and community building. In the work shown, Tiravanija rejected traditional art objects and instead cooked and served food for exhibition visitors.

The following are text excerpts that help theorize care work in the realm of design. Care has been a theoretical concern associated with feminism since the early 20th century, and became more central as a critique with neoliberal rollbacks of the welfare state in the late 20th century. More recently it has addressed shortcomings in the response to the Covid pandemic, and concerns about who will bear the burden of climate change. Theories of care often address how care is invisible, unremunerated, or otherwise devalued.

The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning? Maintenance: keep the dust off; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight; keep the home fires burning. Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time. The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs… clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage… I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art… My working will be the work.
Carelessness reigns… The crisis of care has become particularly acute over the last forty years, as governments accepted neoliberal capitalism’s near-ubiquitous positioning of profit-making as the organizing principle of life. It has meant systematically prioritizing the interests and flows of financial capital, while ruthlessly dismantling welfare states and democratic processes and institutions. The undermining of care and care work, however, has a much longer history. Care has long been devalued due, in large part, to its association with women, the feminine, and what have been seen as the ‘unproductive’ caring professions. The dominant neoliberal model has merely drawn on these longer histories of devaluation, while twisting, reshaping and deepening inequality. After all, the archetypal neoliberal subject is the entrepreneurial individual whose only relationship to other people is competitive self-enhancement. And the dominant model of social organization that has emerged is one of competition rather than cooperation… Defensive self-interest thrives in conditions like these since, when our very sense of security and comfort is so fragile, it becomes harder to care for ourselves, let alone for others. The spaces left for attending to difference or indeed developing more expansive forms of care have been rapidly diminishing. To appropriate a term famously used by Hannah Arendt, a systemic level of banality permeates our everyday carelessness. Most acts of ‘not caring’ happen unthinkingly. It is not that most of us actively enjoy seeing others left without the care they need, or that we share sadistic and destructive impulses. And yet we are failing to challenge the limits being placed upon our caring capacities, practices and imaginations.
The deliberate rolling back of public welfare provision and resources, replaced by global corporate commodity chains, has generated profoundly unhealthy community contexts for care… As carelessness takes hold in so many domains of life, and as community ties are profoundly weakened, the family is often encouraged to step in as society’s preferred infrastructure of care… Our circles of care have not broadened out but have, in fact, become painfully narrow. These caring arrangements are unreliable and unjust… Ideas of social welfare and community have been pushed aside for individualized notions of resilience, wellness and self-improvement, promoted through a ballooning ‘selfcare’ industry which relegates care to something we are supposed to buy for ourselves on a personal basis.
Mending is a common, basic action that has lost ground in contemporary times more oriented to disposability. Mending suggests patching, with any available material, relying on one’s own resources, referring to one’s limits. It is a provisional, but very personal, creative and unconventional action. It does not refer to a professional skill, but rather to an immediate and compelling need, a DIY attitude and a capacity of resistance… It also means repairing, reconnecting something torn. Mending relationships. Taking a step back, rethinking, looking from another perspective, revisiting. It has a healing power on the one hand, and subversive potentiality on the other: it is the possibility to self-manufacture, to be able to create and change the shape of predefined situations. It is joining elements, systems and objects that were disconnected. Threads and connections as a possibility to network, to connect people, places and realities that share similar histories without even knowing it. Mending can go beyond the intimate and the private to connect, and indeed to tie up, the public and the collective. Looking at the colonial as a systemic network of repeated violence and injustice, mending is a transversal, continuous, and necessary act of daily resistance.
Source
Patching should maintain the same professional standards and concern for presentation that we apply to the rest of our work. Patching shoddily is not the same as patching professionally. This is not a manifesto to excuse poor quality work. This is especially true in the classroom setting. Just because we are coming out in defense of mending, does not mean we offer it as a substitute for learning the fundamentals of material and method… We believe it is long past time for the culture of shame and silence around mending and patching to end. One of the biggest problems with this culture of silence is that it prevents makers and teachers from sharing valuable knowledge around this topic. There are a wealth of techniques for mending and we believe in sharing these discoveries freely. Doing so will not diminish or belittle our community. On the contrary: it will only broaden the scope of what is possible.
Source
TIME ... Sewing slows it
EARTH ... Every mend helps
MONEY ... Costs little. Is priceless
FASHION ... Mending is truly trending
RESPECT ... Honor the clothes makers
HISTORY ... Domestic drudgery reborn
SECURITY ... The pleasant feeling of fixed
UNIQUENESS ... Makes every garment special
CONNECTION ... Mending with friends is bonding
MENDFULNESS ... Out of your mind, into your hands
Source

The Choice of Care and Repair

Key to choosing care and repair is putting social and planetary concerns before profit. Ordinary people should not be made to feel responsible or guilty for systemic carelessness. We need to prioritize a model of caring citizenship rather than individualist consumer choices. We need to ensure that consumers are reconnected with producers, and care-receivers with caregivers. (Care Manifesto) This means increasing the visibility of resource extraction, labor, supply chains, and “externalities” such as waste disposal and worker care. The choice of care and repair takes into account issues of social and environmental sustainability.

The Practice of Care and Repair

Everything needs care. Humans are one of the most care-intensive species especially at the beginning and end of life. In addition, virtually everything we humans use requires care—our homes, gardens, pets, resource supplies, energy needs, and even our inanimate gadgets require at least some degree of care. (Sabine O’Hara) Feminist economists argue that while traditional economic theory attaches high value to activities and resources that create high monetary output, care and other efforts that sustain the underlying fabric of economic activity go largely unnoticed.

The Result of Care and Repair

We need to get in the mindset, and the muck, and knit together things and people that have been fragmented. This should reset what we consider to be beautiful in terms of imagery and outcome. The outcome of an incredibly beautiful landscape project might be partly invisible – like the removal of a dam, for example. Un-making damaging practices as a positive and aesthetic act will not be Instagrammable but it will mean life for fish, connection with rivers to their basins, and renewed waterbodies. (Kate Orff) Care and repair may not be visible or look appealing by conventional aesthetic standards. Is that okay? Do our aesthetic standards need to change?