Beyond Repair
"Here, then, are two radically different forces and realities. On one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, an always-almost-falling-apart world. On the other, a world in constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities—a topic of both hope and concern. It is a world of pain and possibility, creativity and destruction, innovation, and the worst excesses of leftover habit and power.
The fulcrum of these two worlds is repair."¹
From August 2020, soft/WALL/studs becomes a site for mutual care. Growing from our past years of engagements, we’re thinking about wellness, and the notion of a well; a collective and collection of gestures existing along continua of repair, restoration, and reinvention within broken, fractal worlds and disorienting sensoriums. What might it mean to live “well”, given our (and Art’s) imbrication within structures of harm, exhaustion, extraction, and precarity? How can we re-envision notions of time, sovereign personhood, multiplicity, labour, rest? What portals can be accessed, what new relations can be formed?
In all, we are supporting nine collectively organised initiatives across this period, facilitated by 12 individuals from soft/WALL/studs. A tangle of programmes will be presented between digital platforms and the physical site of soft/WALL/studs, spanning gardening projects, research and learning platforms, cinematic remedies, complaints resolution systems, gaming sessions, remote listening episodes and scores, scheduled naptimes, writing groups, and collective aid.
Our programmes will continue to focus on capacity building in creative work and life, care and repair, informal education, the redistribution of resources and reimagining of futures, the détournement of visual and bodily regimes, the form of the "complaint", amateur pedagogies, entangled borders, planetary, social, ecological metabolisms, and ecological futures.
Beyond Repair is part of Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, an initiative by National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum.
1. Steven J. Jackson, "Rethinking Repair" in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, eds. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 222.
Schedule
Online talk-in series
22 July 2020, 8.30pm - 10.30pm (UTC+8)
15 August 2020, 3.30pm - 5.30pm (UTC+8)
17 October 2020, 11am - 1pm (UTC +8) / 16 October 2020, 8pm - 11pm (PT)
5 December 2020, 11am - 1pm (UTC +8) / 4 December 2020, 7pm - 9pm (UTC -8)
20 December 2020, 7.30 - 9.30pm (UTC +8)
Sustained closed-door initiative with public activation
August 2020 - January 2021†
Initiative sited at s/W/s with online garden log
29 August 2020 - 31 January 2021†
Sustained closed-door initiative with online component
September - December 2020†
Online sharing sessions
10 October 2020, 4 - 7 pm (UTC+8)
31 October 2020, 7 - 10 pm (UTC+8)
28 November 2020, 8 - 10pm (UTC+8)
Initiative sited at s/W/s with online component
12 December 2020 - 17 January 2021
Thursdays - Sundays, 6 - 11pm
(Closed 24-25 Dec, 31 Dec 2020 - 1 Jan 2021)
Participatory study
July 2021
* Part of regular s/W/s programming, existing beyond Beyond Repair
† Initial sessions of these programmes are closed-door, any public-facing aspects will be broadcasted online