Return to Repair

Abstract

The re-turn, like the repair, is a disruptive act. It pauses Azoulay’s forward thrusting, carving out space in the present. In this, the return and the repair become co-agents for temporal relationships between past, present, and future. If we always configure that temporality with a forward motion, then we fail to consider ways in which the future influences that which is ahead of itself and we set it always in the service of its past. Positing an altered temporal framework based upon the repair allows us to consider a future that is a co-producer of knowledge, understanding, and community. Here I want to use the practice of textile repair – the mend – to consider ways in which we might return to future art histories and thus reframe what we can understand by reparation. Rupture and mend are borne out of violence and hold the parts in tension. Colonial notions of reparation are driven by an urge to hide this damage and thus fail to consider mending as productive, plural, vulnerable, and affective ways of being. Here I want to propose the rough repair as an artistic practice, what Jack Halberstam terms ‘murky resistance’ (Halberstam 2020: 2), a space of alternatives, sometimes counterintuitive and refusing. The rough repair gives us scope to think of reparation through material entanglements that are wrought through violent acts and actions. Repair becomes an ethical space in which questions of differential edges, power structures, and the formation of art histories can become a point of re-turn. The wound and reparation are inherently violent and physical actions, and they are destructive. Within an ethics of care, this violence becomes necessary and important for future art histories. In this essay, I want to use this artistic practice to propose ways in which art histories can be regarded and observed, and thus entreat that repairs and reparations should not be rendered invisible.