Introduction

Memory is the connective tissue that makes lives meaningful. A connection to the past enables sense making in the present and renders possible futures as thinkable. In the case of traumatic or difficult pasts, this connection becomes intensely important. At personal, collective and national levels, past harms and injustices need to be made visible and subject to commemorative exploration in order for victims to ‘go on’ in the present. In this context, repair is usually considered to be a memorial work of putting the past in order to meet ongoing moral and epistemic demands (Margalit, 2002; Blustein, 2008; Campbell, 2014). Through this work it becomes possible to envisage a reconstruction or ‘healing’ of personal and social ecologies of thought and feeling.

This understanding of memorial work as repair is complicated by issues around mental health. For example, while some approaches to trauma (for example Johnstone and Boyle, 2018) emphasize the need to understand personal histories – ‘what happened to you’ – as a way of addressing current feelings and experiences – ‘what’s wrong with you’ – there is also a counter-discourse around the inherently unrepresentable nature of traumatic pasts (Caruth, 1996). Pain and suffering incurred through extraordinary and horrific violations of social and personal relations may be simply incomprehensible and hence difficult to both recollect and to narrate. Mental health issues may also call into question the reliability of memory. Victims – and in some cases perpetrators – may have their recollected experiences problematized or discounted (see Haaken and Reavey, 2010). They may also be accused of focusing unduly and unhelpfully upon the past rather than facing up to problems in the present. Here, repair can take the form of an injunction to disconnect from a difficult past in order to ‘move on’ with living.

In this chapter, we want to explore the tensions in memorial repair work around mental health. We will be concerned with the question of when and how the past comes to matter for persons managing severe and enduring mental health issues. Crucially, we look at the practices which are enacted to manage these tensions, and how they are collectively performed within an institutional setting. Our argument is informed by work we have conducted in a medium-secure forensic pathway in a large inpatient psychiatric unit.

Maintenance practices have been an object of growing interest in recent years, and numerous researchers working in a variety of disciplines have made stimulating forays into a vast continent of jobs and ordinary activities which still appears largely unexplored (Jackson, 2016; continent, 2017; Strebel et al, 2019; Denis and Pontille, 2020b). This body of research works has notably played an active role in acknowledging the importance of material ‘reproductive work’ in the constitution of social life, bringing to light the omnipresence of mundane practices dedicated to making things last. Among these ‘maintenance and repair studies’, some have also initiated a fruitful dialogue with feminist theories of care, especially the work of Tronto (1993), whose definition of care, articulated with Fisher, famously refers to ‘everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40). Extending the empirical and analytical gesture aimed at ‘surfacing invisible work’ (Star, 1999), this conversation between maintenance and care has made two important contributions to the ways in which social sciences approach the relationship between humans and artefacts. On one hand, it has participated in decentring the traditional focus on stability and persistence towards material fragility and its various manifestation (Denis and Pontille, 2015; Domínguez Rubio, 2020; Henke and Sims, 2020). On the other hand, it has emphasized, and documented, the ethical and affective dimensions of maintenance (Houston and Jackson, 2017; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

In this chapter, we propose to further these reflections by exploring a less known, though complementary, aspect of maintenance: its sensorial dimension. If maintenance is a matter of affect, it is also a matter of attention. Material fragility is indeed anything but a transparent feature. In fact, when it appears obvious to anyone, this generally means that maintenance has failed. Fragility of things is thus something that one needs to become sensible to. Making things last entails cultivating a special relationship with them, keeping careful eyes and hands on their condition, and scrutinizing, even sensing, their transformations. Even though some scholars have highlighted the sensory skills involved in specific maintenance activities (Dant, 2008, 2010; Cállen and Sánchez Criado, 2015), little is known yet on how maintainers concretely become attentive to fragility. What is this attention made of? What does it take? How is fragility experienced? How is it dealt with?

From the moment our application became a funded project, the Invisible Farmer (TIF) research team prioritised recording Joan’s life story. Supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2017, TIF was a national project that ran for three years, collecting stories, records and artefacts of Australian women involved in food and fibre production, especially those that brought the Australian Rural Women’s Movement to life in the 1980s (Henningham, 2014; Henningham and Morgan, 2018). A member of a large, multidisciplinary team of historians, sociologists and heritage specialists, determined to make visible the women who were so often treated as ‘silent partners’ in farming enterprises, my task was to travel around the country recording life history interviews for research purposes and subsequent curation in the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Oral History Collection, a truly wonderful assignment. Selecting the 30 women we had been funded to interview was a fraught business when there were so many worthy candidates. Joan, however, was unanimously regarded as ‘a must do’ and, being one of the older potential narrators, interviewing her became a priority. Sadly, there is always a touch of ‘ambulance chasing’ when it comes to making these decisions, and by way of underlining the importance of getting these trailblazing women on the record as soon as possible, my first interview was with one of the first women to operate as a commercial fisher, Mary Mitchelson, who passed away aged 91 in 2020 (Mitchelson and Henningham, 2017). Joan, when I interviewed her in 2017, was relatively youthful at 84. In 2022 she is looking forward to her 90th birthday next year but, as the saying goes, ‘it’s complicated’.

Not long after I interviewed Joan, she was diagnosed with what was described to me by her designated power of attorney as ‘advanced dementia’. Joan never had the opportunity to listen back to her own recorded interview prior to receiving this diagnosis, although she had that opportunity some months later with members of her extended family. I know that experience, of having a version of her own story told in her own voice presented back to her, was one she enjoyed.

Act of stammering. To be irresolute. To be undecided. In times of emergency and crisis, when the world crumbles and life is pushed to the brink of the impossible, to hesitate is second to irresponsibility. Perplexity was an exercise that we could indulge ourselves into back when the catastrophe was a future-to-come, somewhere, eventually. Today, when ecological breakdown is reorganizing the distribution of life and death, hesitation is ethically inappropriate and politically banal.

And yet, here we are, hesitating. I am not thinking generically. My ‘we’ is a very specific one. It refers to the sociocultural aggregate that for the lack of a better category it could be called ‘white people’. Or maybe it is ‘Western scientists’. Or both. In any case, those that have self-categorized themselves as the other of the Other, the other of the ‘Indigenous’. So, what I’m trying to situate is the moment in which, in times of heightened ecological sensitivity, ‘we’ stumble. And not because we find ourselves allowing climate deniers to perforate our principles and convictions – but because we meet the alterity against which we assert ourselves, with our convictions and their enemies; we meet other ways of defining what ecology means and how reparation is done, other ways of delimiting life from death, other modes of practicing time and grief. An ecological reparation otherwise.

Hesitation, for me, has unravelled partaking in the efforts of Likanantai and Mapuche communities to heal lands, waters and atmospheres damaged by settler-colonialism. In the presence of their narrations about and practices to repair wetlands, forests, oceans, and soils damaged by extractivism, I have stammered. I have stepped back. I have mumbled, at odd, confronting modes of organizing biotic and abiotic life in ways that defy my imagination. Other forms of existence, other chronologies and teleologies that mess up with (my) well-defined questions and answers. I like the image of hesitation because it moves away from the eventfulness and determination of the conflict. What I have experienced doing ecological reparation in the Salar de Atacama or Tubul-Raqui, rather than a clash of convictions, is a doubt.

Introduction

The conversations that follow took place while walking through the green spaces of Bristol, in South-West England, in preparation for Linda’s latest ‘act of care’: a commissioned artwork that performs a detailed, delicate repair on an object in public space. The act of care will take as its object a park bench, and on this occasion we’re on a tour of benches in Bristol’s urban parks, looking at their designs and materials, at how, when and where they were made, and where they have been adorned, damaged and repaired.

Public benches hold us; they support us when we need to rest, or talk, or perhaps sleep. They are sites of breakups, of impromptu get-togethers, of wistful daydreams and of drinking and drug taking. They are truly public amenities: an often-overlooked aspect of everyday infrastructure that tends to our bodily comfort, and our need to pause. Our focus on benches helps us to think about how we care for and relate to public objects, and how they in turn care for us. Here, we consider benches as sites for reparation, both against the neglect of public objects and spaces that has been an ongoing feature of the UK under neoliberalism, and against our alienation and separation from each other and from our worlds.

This chapter discusses our relationship to these everyday material infrastructures in the context of neoliberalizing forces that erode the idea of the ‘public’. Drawing on the work of political theorist Bonnie Honig and psychologist Donald Winnicott, it argues for the importance of public objects: shared material forms that physically hold us, and provide material resources for the production of public life. Through a series of conversations, we explore what it means when these objects are invested in, valued and cared for, and what we can do when it is unlikely that this will happen. Linda’s work has, for many years, involved care and repair of public objects. Her acts of care – towards public toilets, streets and benches – are a provocation to rethink how we might care for objects and things. They model an ethos of care towards the world which is not reciprocal yet embeds ways of relating to objects into wider networks of support and worlding.

Ecological reparation

In recent years, practices of reparation (broadly including maintenance, repair, remediation and regeneration) have become lively sites of scholarly interest in the social sciences, particularly in relation to environmental concerns. Some scholars have critiqued the idea of repair as a framing for ecological reparation, seeing repair as too invested in a return to normative relations that are already broken (Middleton, 2018). Indeed, some have argued that repair and maintenance work can keep orders running long past their end dates, masking and displacing the opportunity for system change and alternative approaches (Ribes, 2017).

For others, the idea of repair still has something to offer. Jackson writes about repair as the kind of hope that we need, as we think from – and respond to – ‘broken worlds’ (Jackson 2014). Henke and Sims disambiguate between forms of repair action: ‘repair as maintenance’ works within existing orders whereas ‘repair as transformation’ brings new configurations into being (2020). Henke and Sims suggest that both are required for repair within the context of the Anthropocene, a recursive idea of ‘repairing repair’ (2020: 122).

What is clear to all interested in reparation, is that when moments of breakdown come under study, they are often revealing: decentring subjects and showing up relations in their complexity, in their fragility and in their ever-changing temporality (Houston, 2017). To study repair is to think about the possibility of action in this moment; to examine decisions that are taken about what endures and what is let go. On the one hand, that might mean thinking about building new orders in the world’s aftermaths: working with the conditions at hand and without the expectation of solutions (Tsing, 2017). On the other, reparation might also mean un-making damaging systems through design for decline (Tonkinwise, 2019; Lindström and Ståhl, 2020).

Algorithmic Food Justice

The politics of ecological reparation is increasingly played out in spaces of anticipatory governance. Here, repairing problems involves the conceptualization of new visions of future systems, in which algorithms increasingly loom large as reparative agents. In the case of smart cities, for example, the responsibility for emissions reduction is delegated to networked infrastructures and Big Data, which are intended to produce carbon efficiencies through real-time data gathering, analysis and control (Gabrys, 2014).

Commons and the ecological repair

It appears evident today that the current capitalist mode of production based on the idea of ‘eternal economic growth’ is incompatible with the ecological limits of the planet. The ecological disaster is too big and complex to be solved by existing capitalist politico-economic structures. This is because, on the one hand, many of these structures have a direct interest in maintaining the current mode of production and, on the other hand, the existing way of making and implementing public policies doesn’t have the capacity to follow and react quickly enough to the rapid ecological deterioration of the planet.

In this context, the commons suggest an alternative solution. Commons are defined as a ‘social system in which resources are shared by a community of users/producers, who also define the modes of use and production, distribution and circulation of these resources through democratic and horizontal forms of governance’ (De Angelis and Harvie, 2014).

Being built on relations of collective care, regeneration, and resilience, the commons can contribute to the planetary ecological repair and provide an alternative to the extractive and exploitative relations of the capitalist economy. Learning how to govern our planet as a commons is part of the imperative of becoming more resilient, but also more democratic. As such, the ecological question should not only be tackled in relation to the environmental crisis, but also, as suggested by Guattari (2000), in relation to the social and politico-economic crisis and the prevailing mental ecology. It also needs to be addressed in post-anthropocentric terms, going beyond the human world towards more-than-human life worlds. An important amount of theoretical work has been done in this sense by anthropologists examining indigenous relations with nature and territory (Viveiros Castro, 1998; Rose, 2013; Tsing, 2015), or post-humanist and vital materialist theorists (Barad, 2003; Bennett, 2010; Papadopoulos, 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Commons can address all these questions in practice at different territorial scales and levels.

Within deprived neighbourhoods for example, commons offer an alternative to the current urban regeneration approaches. This alternative involves not only refurbishing derelict housing estates and renovating physical infrastructure but also repairing broken social relations, altered subjectivities, depleted imaginaries, unjust politics and uneven economics as well as empowering communities to participate in the repairing of their neighbourhoods and at the same time participate in the repairing of the planet.

12 April 2019. I take the train early in the morning and I arrive in Trezzano sul Naviglio. Right out of the railway station, I find myself immediately in an industrial scenario: warehouses, factories, forklifts, trucks, graffiti. And workers. All warehouses look pretty much the same with their signs reporting the latest name of the company, maybe the name of the latest owner and a vague reference to their trade. I walk through the monotony and the squalor of this half a mile of tired capitalism. The time of thriving entrepreneurs is gone: some businesses struggle to survive, some are tempted by the allure of relocalizing production where labour costs are lower, others have already abandoned their warehouses. Ri-Maflow finally wakes me up from this nightmarish torpor. It looks like just one more warehouse. Its graffiti looks like just the graffiti I have seen on the walls of the previous warehouses. And yet they are different, they speak to me: ‘Ri come Ri-Maflow, Ri-uso, Ri-ciclo, Ri-appropriazione, Ri-volta il debito, Rivoluzione!’ (Re as Ri-Maflow, Re-use, Re-cycle, Re-appropriation, Re-verse the debt, Revolution!).

I am here to attend the third Euro-Mediterranean meeting of workers’ economy. At the registration desk they immediately find me something I can contribute to: ‘You speak English, right? Come here! How do you say “Dai rifiuti all’arte?” ‘ (From waste to art). ‘Because we have lots of international guests today. If they look at this stuff, they don’t understand it was garbage!’ Pippo, Mara and Mauro call it modernariato, modern antiques: repair and recycling old abandoned objects into authentic pieces of design. ‘In Milan, hipsters would pay 300€ for this. Can you believe it?’ A few hours and many glasses of wine later, I will walk two miles to the nearest ATM to get cash and buy one of these fabulous lamps (can you believe it?). I meet Abraham: he is probably the youngest worker here at Ri-Maflow, he’s from Gambia, he speaks English and he’s happy to show me around. I learn from him that I mispronounce the name of the factory: it is not Rima-flow as I thought fantasizing about a romantic association between the factory and poetry (rima means rhyme in Italian).

Chilean streets, October 2019

Estallido social: these are the Spanish words that people use to refer to what in this article we call ‘Chilean streets’. Estallido social, a social outburst: on 18 October 2019 crowds of protesters took to the streets in the defence of life and against everyday abuse and death in Chile. They wrecked sites that they considered denied their lives and also transformed street walls with words, images and art that proposed hope for a different life. They expressed what we think of as ‘historical wounds’ that the state – colonial and modern – inflicted on the Chilean territorial body as it made a nation on it. In response, the government declared both a ‘state of emergency’ and ‘a war’, bringing the military onto the streets for the first time since the Chilean military dictatorship ended in 1990.

We translate ‘estallido social’ as ‘outburst’: people loosely organized burst out, away from a suffocating grip. In Chile heterogeneous desires and frustrations ‘outbursted’ away from a recent history of neoliberal suffocation; against it ‘the streets’ propelled a demand to rewrite the neo-liberal constitution and obliged the government to accept the project. But ‘the outburst’ also expressed wounds grounded in history, current and past; it emerged against the official historical oblivion of those wounds. As event, the outburst expressed the long durée that birthed it and actively cracked the dam that contained it. In so doing, the outburst may be an event beyond, and perhaps because of, its ephemerality. This eventfulness may also have an oxymoronic and bold future long durée that asserts a possible that while still unknown, may now pulsate as imaginable and against the history that in suffocating them, also allowed their becoming. ‘Chilean streets’ may project a proposal away from the grip of neoliberal politics and the long History that made it. Surpassing the limit that denied them (Guha, 2003), ‘the streets’ became an avalanche. Thus, we propose Chilean streets – and perhaps streets in other parts of Latin America – become in an outside in which they ferment and self-transform in constant and irreducible excess to politics as usual. The streets may be subject to brutal state repression and/or conversely their demands may be accomplished by the government or its opposition, and their force placated.

Introduction

I met Henri as I was studying grassroots community initiatives across Australia in which people with refugee experiences share their stories with established members of the community (Strauven, 2021). More specifically, I was interested in exploring what narrative practices people find most meaningful to their preferred sense of self and their ways of being and relating in the world.