Under what technoscientific conditions might the scarcity of food be understood as contingent on heterogeneous actors? And how might the possibilities of food abundance be approached as a reparative project of valuing their manifold relations? Blockchain promises to be an infrastructure that presents both productive imaginaries and also challenges to such restorative and sustainable work. In a series of workshops, we critically experimented with these possibilities and challenges. Working with diverse participants including community growers, organizers, artists and technologists we used a variety of playful methods to act out fictional scenarios set in 2025, when all of London had been transformed into a city farm. For organizations and participants, reparation meant working in the aftermath of social and environmental collapse to bring into being more-than-human-value systems that radically decentred human knowledge and experience.
Building in a relationship between scientific artifacts and affect, we reflect on the possibilities of a crossing inspiration among sciences to inspire alternative forms of ecological repair. Colombian páramos are considered strategic ecosystems for water supply, pushing policies that have focused on partially prohibiting agriculture. Environmental authorities, supported by natural scientists, developed maps to delimit paramo, while social scientists studied the intimate relations between páramo and campesinos to inform the consequences of restrictions. We argue that the conservation of páramos requires repairing relationships beyond the páramo as "nature." The biodiversity sciences would benefit from participating in sophisticated conjunctions with other disciplines and campesino’s knowledge, which we imagine as ecologies of affections that feed sciences that risk novel articulations. One first step in this direction would be to learn to be affected by ‘inexact materials’; as landscape drawings that offer clues about affective worlds beyond those of science and the state.
With the 2019 Chilean estallido social we write-think-feel the myriad images that actors of the outburst covered the walls of Santiago streets. We read those images as an archive written from the wounds that colonialism-capitalism inflicted on bodies and territories that are together. Albeit ephemeral (authorities can delete them), the images expose mutilations of bodies-territories that are never to be erased, always to be cared for. Composed of presences both unimaginable (the dead, walls, dogs) and imaginable (music, people, images), the outbursts are those wounds. Their presence haunts usual politics: without teleology or leadership – let alone representation – outbursts do not disappear for their mission is to pursue life against destruction. Pursuing life, they roam the streets like mutts, and very specifically like the Chilean kiltro dogs – their decision to negotiate independence and accompaniment as way of life may be an inspiration of another politics: a kiltro politics.
How can a strategic design project enable ecological reparation in deprived suburban neighbourhoods? Repairing broken social relations, altered subjectivities, depleted imaginaries, unjust politics and uneven economics as well as repairing neighbourhood assets, poor architectures, damaged environments and ultimately participating in repairing the planet, doing all this together with concerned communities – this is the ambitious goal of the R-Urban project initiated by atelier d’architecture autogérée. R-Urban creates possibilities for a commons-based mending ecology through a network of civic hubs in which inhabitants of suburban neighbourhoods can develop resilience practices and create locally closed ecological circuits. Five such hubs have been built since 2011 in Paris and London. The chapter gives a critical account on the successes and failures of this undertaking, trying to demonstrate that commons can be a valid pathway for cities mending ecologies and that architects can facilitate this process.
Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by attempting to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair damaged ecologies and to claim reparations for persistent inequities and injustices. The volume brings together a multiplicity of original contributions of international scholars in science and technology studies, environmental studies, ecological humanities, art and design, geography, anthropology and other social sciences exploring a multiplicity of socio-ecological struggles as well as insurgent and inventive modes of conservation, mending, care and empowerment of more than human ecologies.
This chapter is the result of a series of ‘conversations on benches’ between Leila Dawney, a cultural geographer, and Linda Brothwell, an artist, in Bristol during December 2020. Linda is renowned for initiating a repair movement in the arts through her ‘acts of care’, where she performs intricate repairs on objects in public space. Leila and Linda have been collaborating on a new iteration of Linda’s ‘acts of care’ series. This chapter explores the themes of their conversations, including the effect of austerity policies on public objects and spaces, the role of objects in generating a shared life, and our ethical relationships towards objects. It concludes by offering a provocation to care for our shared objects, arguing that small acts of repair and custodianship can shift, at the micro level, our relationships with our world, our sense of who we are, and our sense of responsibility and belonging in public space.
How to think the ecological work of reparation when it is the very arts of living that are in question? Focusing on the devastation brought about by the tsunami that hit the northeastern coast of Japan in 2011, and on the improvisational practices of spiritual care work that a collective of priests fabricated in its wake to address the sorrows as much of the living as of the dead, this chapter explores the aporetics of ‘reparation’ as the incommensurable space opened up between destruction and redemption, between loss and compensation. In so doing, it makes a proposition for generative, partial, speculative forms of cosmoecological reparation: not the attempt to restore the modern terms of order, to render life resilient to disaster, but that of carefully reweaving modes of living and of dying otherwise from the interstices of the catastrophe, of experimentally recomposing a cosmos on a ravaged earth.
In this chapter, we explore the attention to fragility at play in two urban maintenance settings: graffiti removal and water networks management. Drawing on ethnographic fieldworks, we show that maintenance activities consist of situated sensorial explorations by which maintainers carefully scrutinize the state of things and become attentive to their tendency to alter and transform. Paying attention to maintainers’ attention outlines ways to elaborate a specific ecological posture. Maintenance appears indeed as a situated and political process that engages materials, bodies, instruments and texts, and is accomplished through provoking and cultivating encounters within emerging ecologies wherein what acts, and what interacts, is never completely known in advance. Exploring attention to fragility thus helps to reconsider how humans interact with things beyond ‘cultural’ or ‘symbolic’ relations. Furthermore, drawing its value from repetition and constancy, the continuous attentional work that fragility requires performs a reparation that cannot be ‘settled’ once and for all. Far from fixing the state of things, maintenance inextricably participates in their becoming.
State crimes and forced migration due to war violence and precarity are some of the ongoing entanglements of injustice in the landscape of post-accord Colombia. Within this landscape, governmental reparation and asylum solidarity are still deployed as ambitious yet widely limited techno-political projects reproducing historical and ongoing asymmetric relations of power in the encounters between states and those seeking reparation and assistance. Those projects materialize an incapacity of the state to acknowledge the multiplicity of forms of violence and displacement affecting the everyday lives of people on the move and victims of state crimes. Drawing on the repertoire of STS and its intersections with critical migration studies and posthuman understandings of memory, this chapter wonders about those worlds exceeding governmental reparation and asylum solidarity, how bodies engage in material transformative practices, and the role of non-humans in the material politics of other forms of reparation and solidarity.
Ecological Reparation engages with social-environmental degradation by attempting to rethink concepts and practices that may be needed to repair damaged ecologies and to claim reparations for persistent inequities and injustices. The volume brings together a multiplicity of original contributions of international scholars in science and technology studies, environmental studies, ecological humanities, art and design, geography, anthropology and other social sciences exploring a multiplicity of socio-ecological struggles as well as insurgent and inventive modes of conservation, mending, care and empowerment of more than human ecologies.
