Mending as Making

My recent practice can be defined under the umbrella practice of mending, an embodied practice of stitching the ruptured binaries that have been violently torn apart over hundreds of years by what bell hooks describes as ‘‘imperialist, white supremacists, capitalist, patriarchy”. This describes a reality of interlocking oppressive structures that have reorganized our world view to uphold the belief of false divisions and hierarchy between head/heart, male/female, male/other, science/intuition, rational/emotion, design/craft, Western/non-Western, architecture/textile, public/private and abstraction/lived experience, etc. My practice aims to weave together literal and metaphorical mending, care practices and non-Western approaches that question hierarchical knowledge production and aesthetic regimes. If practice + theory = praxis, mending might be positioned as the +, interconnecting the two. Mending is also a family business, an embodied heirloom passed down from my mother that I’m now turning into a critical instrument. However, so far I’ve practiced mending within a pedagogical context. What this fellowship will offer is the opportunity to extend this practice into the context of artistic and design research.

Repair: https://glossary.mg-lj.si/related/repair/652

(summarise from CD course, from my own practice)