Gestures of maintenance

Nowadays I look after the objects that live with me. I see them as organic matter just like my own body, that deteriorates with use and relies on the choices I make.

But it wasn’t always this way. The act of restoring something and lengthening its worn-out existence seemed to my teenage self an old-fashioned and stubborn act. Wasn’t it so much easier to replace something old with something fresh and still untouched?

At the time, I didn’t see objects as an extension of my body, I wasn’t aware of my presence in the world as a reactionary and relational presence at all times. It was my grandmother who first taught me how to mend, and it was from then onwards that I developed an attentive eye to the second life I could give to certain things.

Slowly, the maintenance of objects and the places where I live spread to my relationships. I started noticing how these need nurture as they also rust and wear out with time. Also in my relationships with others, holes and scratches would surface, threads would tangle and colours would fade. Just as it happens with objects, these damages need polishing and adjusting for them to work again.

So when you first showed me the pictures of a market tent, that you saw by accident one day and that was mended all over, we spoke for a few hours about a range of symbologies we saw in that object.

In each repair attempt of the tent, we saw an example of the connections we create with people and the maintenance that they require. We agreed on how the act of repairing something doesn’t mean going back to what it was before, but the opportunity of a new beginning.

Each mending on the tent, of its own size and shape, represents a scar from a past damage. Together, they mark an existence in constant movement that only lives on through these small gestures of maintenance, which you described as a “geography of caring”.

In the pictures you showed me, the holes that are still open have been circled with a pencil, which shows someone’s intention to fix them in the near future. This attentive eye of someone who cares about the preservation of something or someone present in their lives is what we both try to nurture in our day to day.

The attention to the small things and their repairs can not only develop our relationships but also our perception of time, making us recognise the past and preserve the present according to a future.