Socioplastics 11819 What Repair Remembers
Maintenance carries knowledge across time. MendingCulture examines how repair practices preserve technical memory and keep public worlds usable. A repaired bench, building system or digital archive contains decisions about materials, standards and previous failures. When those decisions remain documented, future caretakers can understand what was changed and why; the work of maintenance becomes part of the object’s public history. Bernard Stiegler’s writing on technics and memory connects technical objects with inherited knowledge. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art foregrounds the labour that sustains cultural and civic life. Hito Steyerl explores images and their circulation, while N. Katherine Hayles studies media and technical systems. Together, their work helps consider maintenance as material practice, cultural labour and a means of transmitting knowledge. A maintenance archive could record the date and location of each intervention, the materials used, the worker’s observations and the conditions that prompted the repair. Photographs, instructions and user accounts could accompany the technical record. A later review would identify which interventions extended an object’s use, which generated new requirements and how maintenance schedules distribute labour. The archive would support both future repair and public assessment of budgets and care. MendingCulture gives maintenance a visible role in how objects and institutions persist. It values the practical knowledge of caretakers and links their work to decisions about design, funding and public use. Repair becomes a way of carrying memory into the next stage of a shared environment.
REFERENCES
Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N.K. (2012) How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Steyerl, H. (2012) The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Ukeles, M.L. (1969) Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition: CARE. Manuscript.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html