Beyond Repair
This talk explores the repair of objects and landscapes, focusing on how these experiences can teach us a more meaningful stance toward the world – as well as how digital culture can either impede or support this stance.
Speaker:
Jenny Odell – https://re-publica.com/de/user/19948
Moderation:
Bernhard Pörksen – https://re-publica.com/de/user/11843
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re:publica 24 – “WHO CARES?”
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#Politik & Gesellschaft
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[Music] [Music] [Music] hi um thank you so much for being here and thanks to Republica for um the opportunity to share some thoughts with you um before I get into it I just want to give a little bit of a caveat um in case you start to worry about halfway through that I don’t know where I am um I’m aware that this is a conference about digital culture um and as you’ll see this talk is about some pretty insistently physical stuff it’s about physical repair but I promise that I will come around at the end and talk about how digital culture plays into this and I also invite you to kind of keep that in the back of your head um as I’m going how you think these ideas could play out in our digital lives so I’m going to start off by introducing you to a friend of mine this is Trav um I met Trav in 2015 when we were both living in San Francisco and we had some nominal things in common but there was one major thing we shared a love of trash um not that we would have called it that at the time I was an artist and Residence at Recology SF a waste transfer station otherwise known as The Dump where individuals and businesses could pay to unload U-Hauls full of unwanted objects and the other artists and I referred to the this daily Bounty as the pile for my project which I called The Bureau of suspended objects I was pulling things out of the pile photographing them and finding all the information I could about their manufacturer and marketing basically trying to explain their existence in the world I found that almost everything in the dump contained some kind of surprise sometimes literally um so Trav stuff is most secondhand and when he came to my studio at the dump he saw the objects in a similar way the trash was not trash but objects full of potential deserving of attention but he also possessed something I didn’t have the propensity to bring things back to life one time I found in the pile separately a Nintendo entertainment system with a Super Mario Brothers game cartridge still in it and a seemingly broken 1992 Sony Trinitron monitor I researched in cataloged them but didn’t do anything else for me they were objects of contemplation not objects of use but when Trav visited me at the dump he got the NES working on the Trinitron and we got to play a glitchy uh version of Super Mario Brothers after I finished my residency I moved into an art studio with Trav and some of other some of other people in a space appropriate to our shared interest a creaky old ship building site and a disused pier a structure that even then was slated for Destruction but for some reason still exists today my desk a board sitting across two file cabinets I found from a nearby seller of recycled building materials fit right into the studio which was full of secondhand furniture and things thrown out by other Studios including inspiring paintings like this during these years one of the things I got used to seeing was tb’s hat which you can actually see here in this video at the time there um the Hat was new it’s foldable meaning that it has a circular steel band that lets you pop it out somewhat like a tent and then fold it up and stash it in a little bag but when it arrived the Hat was already asking for a form of repair Trav noticed that the cotton was very weak and didn’t completely block the Sun so he sewed another layer onto it using fabric he found in the dumpster of a textile Factory and MacBook cleaning cloths with he’d gathered while working in it the sewing thread was dental floss on his website he later wrote the result has a post-apocalyptic witch Vibe which is not my usual Vibe but I have adopted it the crazy stitching also makes people ask if I made the hat which the answer is no but I did basically recreate itself on top of itself so kind of I should not that this process has been ongoing when I asked Trav if I could include a photo of his hat in this talk he asked asked if I meant an upto-date photo these are some up-to-date photos trap’s hat and the question about whether he made it may remind you of a famous ancient Greek thought experiment the ship of Theus the thought experiment goes like this if you replace the planks of a ship not all at the same time but as needed as each plank decays is it the same ship and as Trav points out this is also a way of asking have you repaired an Old Ship or you built a new one what I want to do in this talk is dwell in that gray area between repairing and making using a couple of my recent experiences learning how to fix an object or restore a landscape but in addition to this gray area I’ll also talk about what this practice can mean for us for our relationships to objects and places in ways that might ultimately repair us and then as I said I’ll touch on how digital practices and digital culture represent both an obstacle to this kind of relationship and a potential support for it so to start off let’s talk about the relationship between repair and making first in the realm of objects Trav lives in Vermont now but he visits the Bay Area once in a while and on one visit he gave me a darning needle and showed me how to darn a hole in a sock using one of his own that was currently in progress um so I have another little caveat here I have no idea how common sock darning is in Germany but in the US most people I talk to not only don’t do it they don’t know what it is um so I’ll just briefly explain um it involves stretching the hole out on something there are wooden implements for this purpose but Trav uses a jar lid and I uh use a bottom of a jar and then sewing running stitches with long stitches over the hole and then after that you turn 90° and sew across going over and under the stitches you just made this part of the process is very hard to distinguish from weaving you’re essentially making fabric within the hole I swear I wasn’t stoned but during the long hour in which I darned my first sock I realized that this is after all all that fabric is over under over under after my first attempts I half expected my work to come out in the wash combination of my lack of skill at sewing the age and fragility of my socks and the use of such small insubstantial seeming thread but the socks have survived many washes at this point I started to realize that they weren’t just repaired but in fact reinforced in exactly the places where they were the most likely to wear out surprised by this I told a friend that I felt like I’d made my socks go backwards in time but in other ways they went forwards in time obviously it’s not the case that I made a sock but neither is is it the case that I exactly restored it to its add original condition the first paroide darn I still REM remember buying at a Clark’s store in a mall many years ago and I knew they were manufactured overseas but now this wasn’t the full explanation for their existence because I too had had a hand in them repair restores something to a useful condition but there are always decisions to be made in the case of visible visible repair these can be designed decisions or repair can be an opportunity to tailor something to fit your own particular body better and even when something can no longer carry out its intended use there’s the creative decision of what to make out of its material in all of these cases objects aren’t just something to be chosen among taken up and discarded rather they acquire a transparency there appears to be a way of intervening in them which in however small a way it means intervening in the world especially if you’re not used to this it feels strikingly different from the freedom a consumer has to choose among prefabricated options when I was first looking for a thread to darn my socks uh you can see my socks in the corner here I visited a fabric store about a half hour’s walk from where I live the shop was owned by an amazing woman named Lan who basically became my idol in the space of one conversation she showed me the holes she had darned in a Casmir sweater she had I could barely see them at all then it turned out that lawn made all of her own clothes and she didn’t even use patterns sewing was such a part of her life that she sewed for an hour every morning no matter what something that reminded me of what Trav calls his morning meditation one of the things Lon and I talked about was how in the past and even now repair was associated with poverty I mentioned that when my own mother was growing up in the Phil Philippines she regularly made and repaired clothes for everyone in the family this is a dress my mom made for her sister in the 1970s what I observed in both my mom and in lawn was not only the quiet anti-consumerism that resulted from this upbringing but also the easy Continuum between their knowledge of how to construct a garment and and the knowledge of how to repair one because on a basic level in order to fix something you have to know enough about how it’s made in a recent sewing class I took for total beginners when we were asked what our Ambitions were several people said they didn’t necessarily want to make new clothes but rather to alter and repair the clothes they already had over the course of the class you could see everyone myself included have a series of AA moments about how things were made rendering the entire world of sewn objects immediately more legible and this made everything in our closets seem less like end points and more like starting points things we could have a hand in evolving like the ship of Theus so that’s just a little preliminary stuff about um mending I want to move on now to the realm of Landscapes so at the end of my book how to do nothing I use the phrase manifest dismantling which is a counter reference to the American phrase Manifest Destiny my example of such productive dismantling Was the removal of a nearby Dam which not only required significant creativity in policy and Engineering but also basically meant the creation of trout habitat the Bay Area is full of inspiring habitat restoration projects and I’ve remained interested in that practice ever since but I’ve never had a hand in it until I started volunteering at something called Skyline Gardens but in order to explain Skyline Gardens I need to give you some context about where I live many Hills in California are covered in invasive European grasses plants have of course moved around from Millennia and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that believe me as a biracial person I find the idea of a place-based purity Frozen in Time as undesirable as it is impossible so I want to be specific in ecology the difference between what is simply a non-native plant and something that it’s considered invasive has to do with how it behaves in an ecosystem one example of an invasive plant that I believe is also here in Germany is English ivy under the right conditions Ivy will choke out all other species in an area even climbing up and killing trees and leading to what some have called an ivy desert in contrast we also have a widespread non-native plant called broadleaf plantain that commonly grows as a weed in her book braiding sweet grass the Native American Author Robin will kimmerer says that we think of this plant as native simply because of how it behaves it doesn’t colonize entire ecosystems and finds ways to fit itself in deserts of invasive plants have cascading effects on other plants on insects on animals um including humans where I live they can also decrease the land’s natural resistance to Wildfire it gets to the point where we can say in some sense that the ecosystem is broken simply on the level of biodiversity and resilience what remains of this biodiversity is something I’ve become much more familiar with over the last five or six years as I’ve come to learn the names of things I’ve lived near all my life a process that I describe in how to do nothing but in all those years I remained in the position of an Observer just like I observed the Nintendo and the Trinitron I reveled in little pockets of healthy ecosystems when I found them but the relationship was one way characterized by admiration alone at some point I found out about Skyline Gardens a 4-year-old volunteer project to restore a meadow in the Hills East of where I live I didn’t immediately go because I was somewhat intimidated I’d never gardened before having lived in apartments my entire adult life when I did find show up I was given a warm welcome and a gardening tool I had no idea how to use we treed out to the restoration spot which branched off from a trail I’d never been on what I saw there was unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my entire life growing up in the Bay Area there was not only an absence of invasive grasses but a profusion of native wild flowers some familiar some not and this per native purple needle grass a single plant of which can live for a 100 years and whose deep tap route makes it Wildfire tolerant how did this happen I learned that the groups work was informed by an Australian technique called the Bradley method which you can think of as sock darning in Reverse you find existing patches of native plants that have held on and work outward from there proceeding only once those native plants have caught up and recolonized the area you’ve weed it this is a before photo from the area I just showed you in this case there had been a few loopin bushes to begin with although you can’t yet tell on this photo this area is ecologically unique because it’s where the cool weather from the Pacific Ocean meets the hot winds coming from east of the hills so it has a lot of potential for biodiversity a man named Glenn Schneider a landscaper who discovered the site and got a permit from the local parks department to work on it knew that the seeds of invasive grasses only lasted in the ground for 3 years so it was actually quite simple he told me as long as you were willing to come back and mow and weed twice a week for 3 years in the meantime he had planted only the seeds of native plants from Remnant prairies in the nearby Hills and the volunteer group had come back week after week year after year Glenn told me the way he knew it was successful was that the bugs had all come back indeed there are more flies bees butterflies and other bugs up there than I ever see anywhere else on my first day after taking some time to admire the successfully restored Meadow we moved to an area on the periphery that was still in progress on the edge of that Circle in the diagram I just showed you I was invited to get right into the middle of these native flowering shrubs and try to pull the invasive grasses out from within and around them learning the different kinds of invasive grass we were looking for was like struggling to distinguish words in a new language I can only now tell you there are four different kinds of weeds in these photos eventually I started to get it and I decided that I even liked weeding this will be unsurprising to anyone here who Gardens but ripping plants out of the ground may feel counterintuitive if you see nature as something sacrosanct to be left completely untouched the idea of human intervention seems to exist in tension with the idea of nature left alone one could look at the hillside now and ask is this restoration or is this gardening indeed the name of the project is Skyline Gardens but the idea of pure restoration without creativity or renegotiation relies on an often fictional or impossible idea of how something is supposed to be the truth is that this particular ship of thesis has had its planks replaced for a long time for thousands of years the native alone were the ones doing the supposing simultaneously maintaining and shaping the land where the Spanish colonists saw Wild nature the olone had long intervened in essentially gardened and farmed this same landscape to bring about a diversity that was beautiful and advantageous to give just a few examples one of the most beautiful flowers in the meadow Chia was used for chia seeds similar to the ones you’d buy at the store now wavy leafed soap plant was as you might guess used for soap but also to make brushes for cleaning baskets and mortar Stones prairies and Oak Savannah in general were valued not only for all their useful grasses and flowers but as hunting habitat for elk and deer the point here is that in California the idea of landscape immemorial means a landscape that has been immemorially tended or neglected by humans I came across a striking example of this when researching indigenous fire management for my second book saving time it was in a lecture by Mar Margo Robbins the director of a group that handles burning on Native held land left alone prairies will often start to be encroached upon by surrounding forests when Robins showed this photo all I saw was a natural setting but she explained that it because it hadn’t been burned as it normally would have things were out of the desired balance the hazelnut was being encroached upon to the point where animals wouldn’t be able to eat from it and it would eventually stop producing she pointed to a young Douglas fur tree on the right an ambassador of forest and said quote this fur tree is starting to encroach on what is supposed to be an oak Woodland Savannah When leaders like Robins describe a practice like this one that destroys creates and maintains all at the same time they’re not describing something solely of the ancient past currently calfire EST state agency is working with indigenous groups to reintroduce these methods to our forests and prairies because ironically lack of what we call good fire is partly responsible for the outof control Wild s we’ve been having indigenous groups have taught us that while overdevelopment is obviously harmful stewardship means something very different than just leaving a place alone like weeding fire is an intervention in favor of the way it’s supposed to be a biocultural standard that has to do with what we ask of our Landscapes as humans and what they ask from us in return so once again we see how repair is inescapably creative to maintain is also to create that’s one thing that these two brief examples I’ve given mending and restoration have in common it’s hard in either case to separate the fixing from the making because the very Act of repair involves finding ways to tie elements of the past to our present desires for what we want to see in the world but there’s something else important they have in common something that will initially appear to have more to do with a repairer than the repaired if we return to the ship of thesis what what’s missing from this image it’s the person or the people maintaining the ship and their relationship to it this is really important to me to give you a sense of why uh I need to talk a little bit about alienation by which I mean a little bit about my experience of where I’m originally from I grew up in a 50s era Suburban tract in copertino which some of you may know as the headquarters of Apple I spent my teenage years haunting near identical nons spaces like this one cero Crossroads which ironically is the site of a real Crossroads and General Store in the 1800s which is considered very old for us in California cupertino’s actual geographic location next to the Santa Cruz mountains its actual ecological history if it appeared at all felt remote similar to its vague invocation in the background of the architectural rendering of the Apple Spaceship Campus as as an adult I cackled in recognition when I watched vivarium a horror film in which an unsuspecting young childless couple goes to an open house and gets trapped in an empty housing subdivision by Anonymous Sinister forces the winding identical roads confuse them always bringing them back to the same house which they eventually resign themselves to living in the husband starts digging a hole in the front yard in a desperate attempt to reach something else the couple live out their meaningless days in isolation and having mysterious packages of shrink raft food delivered to their door eventually another mysterious package arrives with a baby inside and the inscription raise the child and be released this film would be a great watch for anyone wanting to think about social reproduction but it is also an unsparing depiction of suburban alienation that over the top as it is rain true for me I may not have grown up eating shrink raft food but I am all too familiar with the fear of living an isolated life in a dead world a world that never speaks back to you how this not only makes your environment seem less real but also makes you feel less real so much of my thinking and my work has congealed in response to this early experience and longing this is why in how to do nothing I was so drawn to the philosopher Martin bobber’s distinction between an IIT relationship and an i thou relationship an example of an i it relationship would be the one between a consumer and a product but I it describes really any way of seeing an element of the world as not having its own existence where something can only be useful to you a threat or completely irrelevant in contrast an i thou relationship is one in which the other is a thou has its own reality and where the interaction includes both in this case I am no longer Untouchable but rather changed and affected by thou one familiar example of I thou is a conversation versus just being talked at we know that in an actual conversation each person is equally present and their thoughts and positions are changing based on the others in real time which is why the course of a real conversation can’t be predicted a conversation leaves both speakers changed as so beautifully Illustrated in My Dinner with Andre one of my favorite films and sometimes it turns out that a single conversation can change your entire life the distinction between I it and I thou gave me a way to understand what I longed for in my Suburban youth what I wanted without knowing it was that conversation which would have required an other people not consumers things not products and places not real estate without these I was left with the feeling that neither I nor the elements of the World Around Me truly had anything to do with each other besides happening to be here at the same time to return to the ship aesus it’s as though I could see a ship but not yet see how it had been repaired much L imagine that I could ever respond to its need for repair and so at this point I want to basically turn around and go back the direction we came by thinking about how the other uh the thou appears in both the examples I’ve shared and how repair makes that conversation possible the idea of the other might seem obvious in the case of landscape restoration since the West has its own long tradition of personifying nature but I think there’s something a little different from that happening at Skyland Garden what I encounter there is not so much a universal mother nature but rather a place with its own character capacities and desires this only appeared over time as I visited the site in different conditions on days when different things were flowering or not flowering I noticed that the group has pet names for different parts of the site which serve the Practical purpose of identification but are also clearly Terms of Endearment to name anything is already to enter into a certain kind of relationship with it Glenn who runs the group and who you can see in this photo uses specific language that reminds me a lot of boer’s I thou about the Prairies we work on he writes quote having won our hearts they have called forth a huge effort on our part literally thousands of volunteer hours to assist them on a path to recovery likewise when pointing out the abundance of bugs to me he used similar language it was the bugs who had accepted us who had judged the restoration sufficient to start moving back I mentioned earlier that before this I had never gardened I found that it was surprisingly intimate getting so close to those plants and carefully disambiguating them from the weeds I couldn’t help but notice how different this felt from the many hours in my life I’ve spent hiking and appreciating nature even when I was looking at it very closely after a certain number of weeks individual shrubs I’d worked on started to seem like car characters ones I could see but which were also seeing me after my first visit Having learned how unrelentingly sunny it can get up there I had bought a white parka from a thrift store and a pair of my own gardening gloves which happened to be in almost latex blue the incidental combination made me feel like a doctor two things were happening at the same time the flowers were flourishing but with their inescapable hold on me they were also changing my self-conception turning me into a flower doctor I think I was experiencing what the German theorist Hart MC Rosa calls resonance and his book by the same name which was translated into English in 2019 Rosa maintains that quote are scarcely articulated yet in practice quite powerfully guilty conscience about no longer heeding the voice of Nature and our Collective productivist and competition oriented behavior generates an unspoken Collective desire for nature to become Audible and speak to us again perhaps this explains not only my experience but something I read in an article about the ailing forests of hars national park that in the 9s Park Rangers had had to repeatedly solicit volunteers for help planting trees but in 2019 the number of people showing up at times outnumbered the available seedlings one Ranger said we have a lot of inquiries from people who have a need to do something to help the forest and there I would emphasize the word need now might be harder to imagine this kind of relationship in the realm of objects can you really feel this way about a sock my experience says yes I call as my witness here Marie condo author of The life-changing magic of tidying up I don’t know how popular this book is here but in the US it’s so popular that many people myself included totally wrote it off without ever having read it condo is sometimes associated with an austere minimalism and somewhat ironically with material ISM when I actually read the book I was surprised to find that condo unabashedly personifies objects she talks about which makes sense given that as she mentions at one point she previously worked as a Shinto Shrine Maiden Shinto is an indigenous Japanese religion that is polytheistic and animistic one where a thing we would call an inanimate can very much have a life for example this is a photo my friend recently took in Japan of a small Shrine for the spirit that inhabits this thousand-year-old horse chestnut tree you can find many such shrines in Japan condo’s book which is informed by Shinto but written for the mass Market is fascinating as a translation of these ideas into a culture that doesn’t typically afford experience to non-humans much less to objects to me condo’s book is about acknowledgement in the I thou sense oh sorry uh the section on how to properly store your socks is titled treat your socks and stockings with respect she writes socks take a brutal beating in their daily work trapped between your foot and your shoe enduring pressure and friction to protect your precious feet the time they spend in your drawer is their only chance to rest she implores the reader to lay them flat and fold them in thirds not just because balling them up wears out their elastic but because it’s what they deserve in condo’s book we care for and lovingly arrange objects that speak back to us that thank us for our care my own experience suggests that each time you repair something you take it further away from being a branded product and closer to a thing on its own terms that Converses with you these are some of the things that you come to consider 15 minutes into darning a sock that it’s made out of cotton that grew out of soil in a field somewhere under this same sun in the sky that its chemical dye was synthesized from metals that in some way shape or form came from the ground that the threads were woven the pattern cut and sewed by machines operated by humans even the very shape of the stock of clothing in general is a reminder of The Human Condition how the world brings out in us the need and the capability to supplement our bare bodily existance with materials We Gather from that same world these are not just feelings these are facts the sustained contemplation of which can turn yes even a sock into a thou Marie condo world of cared for objects contrasts in the extreme with the treatment that you see in the recent documentary on Brandy Melville a cheap Ultra fast fashion brand headquartered in Italy but incredibly popular in the US among middle school and high school age girls this film makes a brutal cut between haul videos in which Shoppers display The Many Items they’ve just bought from the store and images of textiles being washed into the sea in Acra the capital of Ghana which houses an enormous second secondhand textile Market where sellers often repurpose used items but obviously can’t save or resell everything in the hall videos the clothes seem almost symbolic passing only briefly through the lives of consumers not made well enough to last long anyway but at the coast in Ghana the solid sness of these Castaways comes to the four they’re now meaningless brand names exposed to the same elements that in some way or another went into their physical material I’m reminded of how I felt standing in front of the pile at the dump this orphaned material cannot simply be wished away vaporized or sent into space its existence becomes insistent calling on us for the acknowledgement that consumerism denies perhaps this is why I was unexpectedly moved almost to Tears by the first page of mending life a handbook for repairing clothes and hearts quote consider every garment you’ve ever owned consider where it is now consider a garment you loved that you let go of along the way deeming it irreparable now imagine hands open in front of you offering you that garment revived and ready to wrap around your body once again ready to keep you warm or dry or cozy or beautiful once when I asked lawn at the fabric store about sashiko mending a Japanese technique she said that in Japan there had been a culture where you had one jacket that was your jacket and if it had a tear in it you not only needed to repair it immediately but you needed to make the repair look good the jacket served you and in turn you had a responsibility to it you were The Keeper of the jacket it goes without saying that this investment of effort and attention into something and the resulting enrichment of its meaning to you is different from the so-called meaning that product advertising offers the kind of prepackaged meaning that somehow always magically disappears once you buy some something and bring it home I had a front row seat to this during the few years I worked at a clothing Corporation where the advertising assets on my screen contrasted with the incoming boxes of what was referred to Simply as product as evidenced by our landfills and those mountains of discarded clothing and by our uncared for Landscapes it’s obvious enough what the importance is of cultivating a culture of repair but what I have tried to focus on here is not merely the Practical and environmental Stakes but the stakes for ourselves and our stance towards the world Hardman Rosa while noting differences across culture finds a desire for resonance to be Universal he writes that quote a lack of resonance and a predominance of alienation represents an objectionable State I take from this that we have a right to Residence this is why we should be doubly angry about the old Paradox with capitalism that not only have we de developed time and saving technology that has not made us free to care for ourselves in the world we also have the technology to make things incredibly long lasting worth repairing and yet we’re just producing garbage faster and faster there are also corporate obstacles to the right to repair as well as planned obsolescence and um I think there’s a panel on that tomorrow um but when I say doubly angry what I mean is that completely apart from the external costs and sheer irrationality this this situation deprives us of the meaningful relationships that can also maintain us now when you think about those hall videos and a world of unacknowledged objects passing through our lives you might be reminded something uh of something else other than shopping scrolling indeed in his book non things y Tran another local figure uh writes that quote the contant constant typing and swiping has a substantive impact on our relation to the world I swipe away the information that does not interest me I zoom in on the content that I like I have the world firmly in my grip Han is concerned that the real physical insistent world of things of the thou and the I thou relationship is slipping away from us with a smartphone he writes reality is deprived of its presence we no longer perceive the material vibrations of reality perception is disembodied the smartphone deriz the world end quote anyone who has used social media for any amount of time knows that the things that we encounter there do not have staying power we are constantly scrolling through them junking old images for new ones in my second book I write that Instagram should not be considered a social app but a shopping app it not only literally includes many shopping features and makes consumption more seamless than ever before it also encourages a consumerist mindset towards places and Landscapes which appear marketable as potential backdrop to be added to the storefront of one’s life for a power user Instagram provides a grab andg go menu of entire Lifestyles and ideologies there are many ways in which intuitively you could argue that there’s something about the digital that inherently blocks resonance and makes everything feel slightly less real I sometimes joke that buying things with one click shopping on Amazon feels like receiving an IRL JPEG and yet when I reflect on my own experience learning about repair I think there is an important role for the digital to play here and that role has to do with networks and wisdom I think of how someone from a nearby restoration project recently visited Skyline Gardens to help out and gather tips and knowledge to apply to her own site I think of Trav who lives on the other side of the country for me now and how we’re always messaging about repair our Inspirations successes and failures little things we figured out I think of the app I naturalist which uses computer vision to estimate IDs for plants and animals but where human users provide Corrections or contexts I naturalist was huge for me in learning the names and shapes of things but there’s also just the fact of being connected to others who I know are paying attention in similar ways and I think of this land care Zine by a group working on what they call test plots in Southern California giving loose tips based on their experiments restoring small patches of land and suggesting the ways that a reader could adopt them these examples bring to mind a term mettis which I came across in the book seeing like a state medis means practical knowledge that’s developed in a local context as opposed to one- siiz fits-all standards one of Scott’s example is the rule of thumb used by Native Americans in New England in which you plant corn when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear he contrasts this with the American Almanac in which the author gave specific days on which to plant things a rigid technique That Couldn’t adapt to shifting locations or Seasons because it’s collectively used and maintained and because it naturally evolves over time to accommodate different circumstances Scott compares mettis to the way language adapts and evolves he Notes too that the essence of mettis Lies not in the content of the rules themselves but in knowing how and when to apply them compared to officially sanctioned knowledge metis is embedded in everyday experience thinking about mettis made me look differently at an old and rather silly project I did more than 10 years ago called people younger than me explaining how to do things at the time I meant it as a jokey anthropological exploration into the how to vide Trope but now I think I also see it as youthful foray into various forms of mettis and the naturalness of wanting to share and participate in collectively maintained practical wisdom the very same platforms that encourage an IIT consumerist relationship can be and are used to Learn remix and disseminate knowledge about how to have more of a hand in the things we care for unlike advertising or propaganda the howto is not complete until the Watcher leaves the screen and tries it for herself perhaps discovering something new and useful in the process and sharing it with others it was Trav who showed me how to darn a sock but it was a woman on YouTube I turned to when I forgot the specifics I ideally of course these connections would happen on non-commercial platforms that don’t have Financial incentives to keep us addicted to them but there’s also another broader way in which I think the digital can be helpful here simply in terms of directing our attention toward repair in general remember when I said I feel like I’m making my socks go backward in time implicit in this statement is the idea that as time goes forward everything inevitably falls apart in a podcast called on point about fast fashion reuse Advocate Danielle verier said that in her research on Shen a lowquality super fast fashion brand whose clothes have been known to disintegrate in the wash some of the comments she got from gen Z Shoppers were nihilist in tone quote the world is falling apart so why can’t I have this $3 top and look cute while I can understand where they’re coming from to me this is a world view unsustainable both ecologically and emotionally when I think about how to combat this form of declinism I think of something Glenn pointed out to me from the restoration site a similar sized Meadow on a peak less than a mile south of us another group had just started restoring that site using techniques that Glenn had been using here they were on year one I.E not a lot of flowers yet I looked around us at the orange of the poppies the yellow of the Tidy tips the blue of the blue eyes and I said it must be nice for them to look over here and see this while they’re working likewise in every domain I think we need images of repair not only to be reminded that our world world takes work to maintain but also to be reminded that while yes everything does eventually fall apart a huge and meaningful part of the human project is in forestalling and sometimes even reversing that flow holding together the set of relationships that makes the ship of thesis survive to another day I think this is especially important for a generation that is traumatized and desensitized to the idea of improvement to me a repair stance makes sense as a response to declinism because it starts from Brokenness from the present it is a wish for longevity that assumes ongoing failure it does not magically make things go away as we do either when we scroll or when we write off the future as a foregone conclusion and it does not replace broken things wholesale both methods I described earlier sock darning and the Bradley method take as their starting point that which is still holding together just as importantly repair as a stance doesn’t just assume that the world needs work it also opens our eyes to all of the work that has made possible many of the things we take for granted if repair ordinarily feels hidden it’s not just due to the Amnesia of consumerism but also because currently those who maintain Society are typically at the lower ends of gender racial and class hierarchies something that I also touch on in my second book at least within my own experience I have found that even in the small amount of repair that I have done the repairs of others past and present have become far more palpable recently I looked more closely at a denim jacket I had bought secondhand many years ago and realized it had been mended so skillfully by its previous owner that I had never noticed I noticed how many repair shops there were in my neighborhood tailor shoe repair watch repair vacuum repair iPhone repair inside of thrift store its own window in need of repair Having learned to weed I noticed plots that have been weeded how many people who lived near my apartment had planted native plants and I could even recognize the non-human maintenance work of the garden’s pollinators I wonder if there are ways that our shared knowledge and experience online could help us here too not just disseminating practical wisdom but highlighting and drawing attention to the patches of our world the beautiful repairs the successful Meadows amidst the ruin and all the things going backwards in time against the certainty of demise because for many of us it is not just our things and our places that are in need of repair but our entire relationship to the Future in how to do nothing I quote the ecologist Aldo Leopold who writes that quote one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds much of the damage in inflicted on land is quite invisible to Layman now now I would add that much of the repair is also quite invisible to lay in the world of wounds whether in objects or Landscapes looks quite different if you have some notion of how to fix them even if it’s painstaking even if it’s small even if there’s not enough time to fix everything so I started this talk by mentioning my friend Trav and I’m going to close it by mentioning another friend and it’s not the cat um if anyone here is familiar with how to do nothing you know that it is largely inspired by Municipal Rose Garden 5 minutes from my apartment I have either sat in or pass through this Garden almost every other day since 2016 it has been indispensable to me um as a person and as a writer and I truly believe neither one of my books would would have been written without it as you can imagine I’ve gotten to know some of the volunteer gardeners one of whom is a man named royal royal is retired and can be found in this Garden pretty much every day the garden as we know it would not exist without him but I’m also convinced that Royal as I know him would not exist without the Rose Garden this place is full of evidence of Royals Artistry training roses to grow in certain directions cutting grafting planting supporting uh much of which took me years to notice one day while I was working on this talk I ran into Royal and I told him about the plant restoration project he congratulated me on discovering the joys of weed and it turned out that he knew lawn at the fabric store because sometimes he had to buy thread to repair the the leather gardening gloves in the garden’s toolbx he showed me some of the gardening tools saying the high quality ones were made by a Japanese company that used to make samurai swords they seemed like they would last forever I told Royal I was about to give a talk in Berlin it turned out that he gave talk sometimes too about the history of roses then he told me about something he always mentioned in that history talk a rose in the in our garden that was a copy of a very old Rose sometimes referred to as the Thousand-Year Rose the climbing rose plant from which ours was copied he said had been growing since the 800s here in Germany at the hild desam Cathedral the cathedral was bombed during World War II but the root system of the Rose remained intact and it eventually resprouted in fact it still grows there today new flowers old root system its own ship of Theus whenever I look at our copy in the garden now I think about the thousand- year row it’s hard to imagine even the most cynical person standing in front of it and not finding it meaningful not affording it some kind of experience and Life Time Has weight after all the rose issues a call for us to assist it in its survival and to be changed and repaired in that assistance to become keepers of the Rose in turn being the keeper of anything is what ties us a little more firmly into this world into its past present and future lessening the danger of slipping away into heartbreak and alienation it’s a little patch of I thou and a world of I it that’s why it’s in situations like this which arrive every day in forms big and small that I think you can truly ask who is repairing whom thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] should be [Applause] yeah so let me first thank you Jenny for your beautiful lecture I think there was never never an occasion at the Republica where somebody was talking with such intensity compassion and care about socks and I actually could feel the ripple effect of your talk because I was sitting next to Ana doshite be here representing the PTI Linka and she was knitting socks and there was somebody else knitting a bag so really there is some effect but let me ask let me ask you a question which really haunted me during your lecture on the one hand we have this macro level of Destruction the climate crises species Extinction the rise of populism you all know this and it might be that a fascist clown will take over your country next year and on the other hand we have this micro level of existence which you described so beautifully with this idea of of repair and how are these two levels related how are these individual actions in our personal life related so to speak to the planetary scale yeah I think um I think of these smaller kind of everyday interactions and actions as being kind of like a laboratory for well actually before even that it’s just sustenance right like before you do anything you need to be sustained like emotionally and um just to be able to get to another day so there’s that level I mean when I when I talk to the other people in the Restoration Group it’s very clear that it’s serving that function for everyone um and then so then on top of that I think it’s a sort of laboratory for learning um ways of interacting or thinking about change um that I think are much more useful at least in my experience um than the sort of like Doom scrolling like sense of a of a problem um I mean I also think think of like um you know people who have been involved in like Union actions like often are like learning new ways to like build solidarity or just you know ways to interact with other people where it’s not like your cooworker or your friend it’s like something else you know so I kind of think of it as like a a base layer kind of where you start kind of growing Sprouts of things that then can become useful in bigger ways or like join up with other sort of actions in a bigger way and do you also see this problem like a cruel optimism putting too much responsibility for the repair of the world so to speak on the individual yeah I mean that’s uh as you know I want to write about this more in the future and that’s it’s been similarly haunting me too it’s like when um when is something um well there’s that question right like when is it too much on the individual but also when is something a Band-Aid when really the whole thing should be rebuilt like so and I I find those questions kind of like intimidating but also it’s the type of intimidating question where you it’s actually quite exciting to think about um like what is that line um and that’s like you you can see that all throughout politics right like small changes versus big changes and like when is one at the cost of the other and how do you calculate that I was listening to you as someone being interested in media Theory and I was reminded of the famous phrase the tenant of media Theory by Marshall mllo the medium is the message and I if I think about your lecture I think you proposed a different idea the context is the message the meaning is in the context can you relate to that idea yeah yeah yeah yeah I I don’t remember where I said this or when but at some point I said that my medium was context as an artist because I was trying to explain why I do things like go to the dump and I don’t make paintings um and so I think I’ve I’ve also for a long time been obsessed with this question of um how impossible it is to separate things out from their context like even a person right like I’m a different person here than I am at home um I mean there are more extreme examples in ecology it’s impossible to isolate any kind of organism from its environment um and so like that’s another kind of undecidable question that I am like constantly revolving around um but I do think that on the whole it’s been sort of my part of my project has been to try to bring context back into things where I feel that it’s been Stripped Away often times in order to like sell it better or have it sort of be consumed more quickly and if we relate this to digital culture I mean Donna boy was here a couple of years ago at the Republic and she was talking about the collapse of context and we clearly have if we look at digital culture this is not cultural pessimism but we clearly see a distortion of context a distruction of context and the collapse of context so how would you say within your communication Theory where the good conversation is becoming uh an ideal or a metaphor for a good life so to speak how would recontextualization help in order to have a better form of debate or conversation of talking to each other I mean I I was just talking to someone about this the other day about uh actually how you know like I hate Facebook but we were talking about Facebook groups and how like a Facebook group like for example they don’t use Facebook but the everyone in that Restoration Group stays in contact online throughout the week and that interaction is grounded in the fact that everyone is showing up every Sunday and is all thinking about the same physical place and so in that sense it just becomes like a tool like it’s just purely useful um versus something that is completely divorced from any like time place or situation where there’s you don’t have nothing in common except for just this platform I see yeah I see I understand if I and I it might be a very personal question you were quoting the Mystic Martin bber and Martin buber’s idea of a dialogue is clearly a rep representation of the Eternal dialogue with God so and then you were showing us all these objects and these socks and at a certain moment the socks were no longer socks and the objects were no longer objects in a sense they were start to talk back yeah and are you getting close to a spiritual or animistic worldview with that form of describing a different approach to the world um probably yeah I kind of um I kind of stopped short of like really talking about any of that like or like naming anything you know because I feel like that carries a lot of baggage but I do think it’s kind of safe to say at least from the conversations that I’ve had with people and also with readers um without necessarily like naming spirituality I do think it is clear that a lot of people want some more MH like that people are searching for meaning purpose something that um does not quite fit into like a utilitarian framework of like success and accumulation um and I am definitely one of those people so yeah that’s what I would say MH let me ask one last uh question and it’s a question I referring to um one of the early German internet philosophers Peter claz Peter glaza who was here a couple of times before and Peter clasa was once asked to give a speech to humanity so to imagine this thought experiment that there would be the situation he’s giving this huge speech to humanity and to condense the most important message in one sentence at the end so probably we could imagine this situation in a blameful manner and you would have this one sentence to say to humanity what would that be as a final question to you oh man I hate those kinds of questions um pay attention to your socks I don’t yeah I think that is very wonderful pay attention to your socks thank you for paying attention to Jenny Odell thank you for coming over from Oakland thank you very much thank you thank you w [Music]