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september 21-22-23, 2007
Ynkb art fair reparation
YNKB stand
The YNKB repair workshop on Copenhagen Alternative Art Fair in function
Jessica and Anna sewing
Stoffer is gluing the sewing box
All the repaired objects
See all the repaired objects
from YNKB Art Fair Reparation
Through recycling and repairs, utilitarian objects to which we are
attached can be renovated. It is a way of giving things value, another
meaning, and a new aesthetics, when these mass produced consumer goods
are reworked and become unique objects. At the same time, another
form of economy is created in place of the market and the consumerism
that is advertised everywhere. In the media, ecology is about cars
and windmills; recycling and repairs are not valued as a social-economic,
resource-saving alternative.
Waste is one of the greatest societal problems – also at the
global level. Using the browser, Alltheweb on 29 November 2002 gave
17.5 million hits for waste, whereas terror gave 7.3 million, poverty
6.5 million, unemployment 3.7 million, racism 3 million, and hunger
1.5 million. Google and other browsers gave similar results (see Zygmunt
Bauman: Wasted Life, p.35). This involves material waste, where consumerism
and demand for new goods creates ever larger rubbish heaps. But it
is unfortunately also about human waste – people who are not
needed, both in industrial and especially developing countries, where
groups in the population have become superfluous and are fleeing,
are kept in slum areas and refugee camps without any future, or are
hunted like animals at Europe’s and USA’s borders.
Repair days will hardly solve the world’s waste problems but
can perhaps give occasion to consider whether an object has really
served its purpose and must be sent to the dump, or whether its lifetime
can be extended by using a little ingenuity. It is also fun and maybe
the most sensible form of creativity in a world where almost everything
has been invented and the hunt for something new has become absurd.
Nothing indicates that greater productivity or inventions of ever
more thingamajigs and consumer goods can either save or change the
world, on the contrary. So why not be happy with what we already have
and try to make it function again?
YNKB
Consumerism is a culture of addiction, driving its subjects to the
consumption of ever-newer, “immaculate” products, in search
of an ever-diminishing sense of satisfaction, always fleeting and
never fully realized. Its most highly prized commodities come packaged
in promises of enhanced pleasure, largely defined by increasing its
purchaser’s desirability on the open market. In this situation,
even a supposedly utilitarian object is defined less by its intrinsic
value than by extrinsic needs imposed upon it for ulterior purposes,
namely the consumer’s need for not only self-esteem, but, ironically,
a sense of self in the first place.
Two of the many factors constraining an objects ability to do this,
is when it breaks in a way disallowing its restoration to the original
condition or when it shows wear, both, exposing the owner to the symbolic
threat of imperfection, vulnerability and death, hence the need for
disposal and replacement.
As a healthy and, unfortunately, increasingly unusual response to
this, Kirsten and Finn have initiated a project of restoring and repairing
discarded objects, not with a view to returning them to some “perfect”
condition, once again satisfying the aforementioned extrinsic “needs,”
but so as to return them to intrinsic utility, without trying to hide
the effects of accident, time and use, but to find within these, the
chance for singularization.
A beautiful precedent for this can be found in Zen pottery that uses
chips and breaks in the object that, rather than devaluing it, are
an opportunity for the introduction of new color and mark. Like this
pottery, the aesthetic affirmed by Kirsten and Finns project isn’t
one of impossible completion and finality, ironically subverted, covertly,
in the interest of new consumption, but one of open participation
and change that doesn’t hide from life’s signs of fragility
and death, but, rather, finds in these sources for the introduction
of creativity giving rise to the new.
Keith S Pirlot
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