Introduction

Minor Powerplay

Franziska Pusch

What can mending achieve as a collaborative practice?
What are struggles and benefits?

Mending Together

Research focus & aims

Main Viewpoint

Alternative Viewpoints

Excerpts from final project

Continuation

Craftivism -> collective vs activism? -> craft & working together -> mending together

Giving space and frame to others to make by hand and mend

Mending means putting things that have fallen apart back together. In a throw-away society it is a radical notion to invest time and energy or money into repairing something instead of disposing of it and replacing it again cheaply.
While it is a consumer-based solution to waste, it also puts money back into a more circular economy, by paying seamstresses or phone repair shops instead of a big fast fashion brand or tech corporation. It can also empower people with skills to fix their own things, like repair cafes do for example.

Making a collaborative mending space & conversations on mending

My viewpoint:
We benefit from crafting & mending; we dont do either enough

Richard Sennett:
We can achieve things together

Through reading (some examples):

- Community and creativity: A life stories perspective, Paul Thompson
--> how do people get into creative fields? what does community have to do with it?

- Mending and Anatomy: Making Your Hands Knowledgeable, Celia Pym
--> real life experiences with mending with and for others

Other mending & craft projects:

- Craftivism: Elemental birds (Inga Hamilton), Comfort blanket blanket for our planet (Gijse van Bakel)

-Mending: The Mending Project (Lee Mingwei), Orsola de Castro on mending clothes

Conversations leading up to and during the digital mending meetings

Original idea:
Public and open event/workshop for mending, where skills are shared

--> Covid-save alternative:
Small gathering where everyone brings something to be fixed, finding solutions/teaching eachother, directed conversations on mending

--> Final quarantined version:
Individual talks with people where we each fix something and talk about mending

First Talk:

- definition: mending vs repair
- maintenace as mending
- seeing emotional value in objects and putting work into them

Second Talk:

- mending & refashioning of clothes to increase how we personally value
- values of clothes that we actually love
- difficulties of finding time to fix/make clothes

Third Talk:

- having the time and space with others to sit down to mend can be motivating
- meditative value of darning

Continued research:
- Finish reading Richard Sennett "Together"
- Find more mending projects
- Contact other menders/ artists that include mending in their practice
- research/contact organisations like repair cafes

Make a mending get together in some form happen

For the public event possiblity of offering a calming mending/making space, if there is a publication making a guide for starting mending get togethers