Repair can restore an object to use, but it can also preserve knowledge about failure, materials, techniques and the people responsible for maintenance. MendingCulture identifies the shared practices through which that knowledge is recorded, transferred and revised. Stiegler explains the role of technical supports in memory; Ukeles makes maintenance labour visible; Steyerl examines how images change through circulation; and Hayles situates cognition across people, tools and media. The essay uses a neighbourhood repair workshop as a proposed test. It asks whether records of earlier failures help newcomers make safer decisions, who supplies the labour, and whether volunteers can refuse unpaid responsibility for neglected public services. The claim is limited: repair becomes a knowledge infrastructure when its lessons and obligations remain accessible and contestable, not simply when damaged objects are made usable again.
What Repair Leaves Available
A repaired chair can return to use while the experience of repairing it is lost. One person found the failed joint, another knew which tool would work, and a third recalled a previous repair. If those decisions are recorded and shared, the next repair may be safer and less dependent on a single person. MendingCulture names the practices through which repeated repair creates transferable knowledge, agreed responsibilities and a record of material limits. It is not a name for repaired objects or for the aesthetic appeal of visible damage. The evidence lies in who can use the knowledge, how procedures change after failures and whether responsibilities remain fair. A workshop that repairs many objects but depends entirely on an exhausted volunteer has not necessarily built a durable repair culture.
This proposition carries a political danger. Communities with insufficient public services may become expert at repair precisely because institutions have abandoned them. Celebrating their inventiveness without examining the burden of maintenance can turn neglect into a virtue attributed to those who suffer its consequences. The repaired chair may be a sign of collective care, but the repeatedly repaired public staircase may demonstrate a failure of municipal responsibility. MendingCulture cannot be established simply by observing generosity or technical competence. An inquiry must ask who performs the work, who pays its costs, whose knowledge becomes visible and whether participants can refuse the labour without losing access to essential resources. The operator distinguishes cultural infrastructure from coerced resilience. Its success is measured not by endless endurance but by the capacity to make repair's authorship, costs and future conditions publicly negotiable.
Stiegler: Memory Outside the Mind
Bernard Stiegler's philosophy of technics challenges the separation of human memory from the supports through which experience is retained and transmitted. Tools, inscriptions, recordings and technical systems participate in the temporal organisation of knowledge. A repair manual is not simply an afterthought to practical action; it can influence the next intervention and the repertoire of techniques available to those who were absent from the original event. The relevance to MendingCulture lies in this exteriority. Shared repair knowledge does not persist solely as individual competence. It may be carried in annotated drawings, tool arrangements, photographs, digital tutorials, recurring gestures and marks left on an object. The cultural life of repair depends upon the capacity of these traces to remain accessible and interpretable across changes of personnel and context.
However, technical memory is not automatically collective memory. A repository of maintenance instructions can become inaccessible behind a proprietary platform, locked into obsolete formats or separated from the conditions under which its recommendations were learned. A repair video may preserve a technique while erasing the hazards, failures and disagreements encountered by its authors. MendingCulture must therefore evaluate not only the presence of recorded knowledge but the arrangements of custody and revision through which the record can be used responsibly. The crucial question is whether technical memory enlarges shared practical judgment or substitutes prescribed procedure for it. Stiegler helps expose the temporal depth of the apparatus; Socioplastics adds the demand to reconstruct the social permissions through which that apparatus becomes genuinely transferable.
Ukeles: Whose Maintenance Counts as Art?
Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Art transformed ordinary acts of cleaning, caring and sustaining institutions into an explicit artistic and political field. Her work makes visible the labour through which the apparent autonomy of cultural and urban systems is maintained. The importance for MendingCulture is not merely that maintenance can be aesthetically compelling. It is that the conventional hierarchy between creative production and reproductive labour can be challenged through artistic form. A museum relies upon cleaners, guards, conservators, technicians and administrators whose work is rarely presented as a condition of the artistic event. A city depends upon sanitation workers, gardeners, engineers and countless others who sustain public space after an inaugural architectural gesture has been celebrated.
Yet the translation of maintenance into art introduces its own tension. Visibility may recognise work without altering wages or decision-making authority. An exhibition can celebrate care while depending upon precarious labour structures. MendingCulture therefore cannot infer social improvement from representation alone. It must examine what changes when maintenance becomes intelligible as public knowledge. Are workers able to define the procedures by which their work is evaluated? Do records of recurring failure reach the people who can redesign the conditions of work? Is maintenance used to justify withholding investment in durable systems? Ukeles offers the radical displacement of attention; the operator requires a further account of how attention may or may not become institutional responsibility. The distinction prevents the romance of care from taking the place of its political economy.
Steyerl: Images That Wear Out and Circulate
Hito Steyerl's writing on the poor image and the circulation of visual material makes another form of maintenance visible. Digital images do not simply persist as identical objects moving through neutral channels. They undergo compression, copying, caption loss, platform translation and transformations of authority. Their deterioration can open unexpected forms of access while also obscuring provenance and facilitating appropriation. A community archive of repair may depend upon precisely such unstable documents: photographs taken on old phones, scanned instructions, annotated screenshots and videos whose platforms may disappear. The material condition of images therefore participates in the history of practical knowledge. A repair can be remembered through a visual trace, yet that trace may gradually become detached from its original circumstances.
MendingCulture intersects ImageCompost and DocumentationFray at this point without becoming identical to either. ImageCompost concerns the decomposition and recomposition of visual traces; DocumentationFray describes the breaking of documentary relations; MendingCulture concerns the social practice that keeps knowledge usable, including decisions to repair documentary chains. The critical question is not whether every original image can be perfectly preserved. It is whether the archive retains enough context for future users to know what the image records, who made it and what assumptions shaped its meaning. A low-resolution photograph may remain useful when accompanied by a careful account of material conditions; an immaculate digital reproduction may be misleading when its provenance has been erased. Steyerl helps resist a purely conservationist model of fidelity. Circulation can create new publics, but those publics also require the possibility of returning to evidence.
Hayles: Distributed Cognition and Practical Judgment
N. Katherine Hayles's investigations of cognition, information and technogenesis complicate any picture of repair as an isolated human mind applying knowledge to passive matter. Practical judgment can emerge through interactions among bodies, tools, interfaces, representations and environments. A worker diagnoses a malfunction through sound, vibration, prior instruction, a diagnostic device and the response of the material under pressure. The instrument is not merely a channel through which pre-existing knowledge passes. It helps constitute what can be noticed. This perspective offers an account of why repair cultures are inseparable from the infrastructures that sustain them. The transition from paper manuals to automated diagnosis does not simply increase speed; it can alter what workers are permitted to infer and where responsibility for mistakes is located.
Distributed cognition should not become a pretext for dissolving individual or institutional accountability. If an automated platform recommends replacing a component that could have been repaired locally, who is responsible for the resulting material waste? If access to diagnostic data is restricted to a manufacturer, how can a community preserve repair knowledge across product generations? MendingCulture requires attention to the governance of instruments as well as the skills of users. A genuinely transferable method might integrate formal instructions with annotated accounts of situated exceptions, leaving room for skilled disagreement. The point is not to romanticise manual craft against digital systems. It is to recognise that the ability to understand and alter a technical arrangement depends on where interpretive authority is placed within the network of tools, people and institutions.
A Workshop as an Epistemic Infrastructure
A neighbourhood repair workshop offers a concrete environment for testing these claims. Instead of counting only the number of objects returned to use, a study could record the history of each intervention: initial diagnosis, tools and materials used, attempted solutions, unresolved uncertainty, the provenance of advice, the time and labour contributed, and any conflict over whether continued repair was appropriate. With consent, participants could produce a shared documentation system accessible to subsequent users. The study would compare what is learned through isolated interventions with what becomes possible after repeated repairs have generated a publicly revisable record. Researchers could examine whether earlier failures change how a later object is diagnosed and whether techniques become usable beyond the original group.
The evaluation would also include distributional and ecological questions. Does the workshop mainly serve people with time to participate? Are some individuals becoming informal unpaid technicians for essential community infrastructure? Are repairable objects available only to those who possess certain tools or technical literacies? Does the workshop's existence permit public authorities to withdraw maintenance services? Such evidence would complicate a simple narrative of civic resilience. MendingCulture becomes a useful operator when it can document the emergence of shared capacity while recognising that collective care may coexist with exploitation. A negative result, in which the archive grows but repairs remain dependent on one exhausted volunteer, would be analytically important. It would reveal that recorded knowledge has not yet become a sustainable cultural infrastructure.
Repair, Responsibility and the Right to Stop
Stiegler, Ukeles, Steyerl and Hayles make different contributions to an account of repair. Stiegler examines the technical supports of memory, Ukeles the labour hidden by cultural institutions, Steyerl the changing conditions of image circulation, and Hayles cognition distributed across humans and technical systems. MendingCulture links these problems through an observable practice: maintaining objects and records while sharing the capacity to interpret failures. It should not turn repair into a universal moral good. An unsafe component may need replacement, and a community should not be expected to compensate indefinitely for a public authority's neglect. The operator is useful when it clarifies both how repair knowledge is transmitted and who may legitimately refuse the work.
For Socioplastics, the lesson is especially concrete. Publishing a conceptual series is not the same as sustaining its accessibility and intelligibility across changes of software, audience and institutional arrangements. Bibliographies require correction; metadata require maintenance; obsolete links require repair; and archives of prior versions must survive revision. Yet the cultural importance of these tasks depends upon their distribution. If only the author can navigate the structure, maintenance has not become publicly transferable. If the apparatus invites others to care for it without recognising the work involved, it risks reproducing the inequity it seeks to expose. MendingCulture proposes a more difficult horizon: not simply a world in which everything can be fixed, but one in which the work of fixing remains visible, teachable, disputable and capable of being refused.
A particularly revealing comparison would examine how repair knowledge is transferred between generations of participants. A technique that appears successfully documented in a manual may prove unusable when the original tools are unavailable, when materials have changed or when the instructions omit tacit judgments that experienced practitioners never needed to explain. Conversely, a brief diagram supplemented by opportunities for apprenticeship may preserve more practical intelligence than an extensive digital archive. MendingCulture should therefore distinguish access to records from access to the capacities those records promise to transmit. The researcher might observe whether newcomers can reproduce a repair safely, identify the limits of the procedure and recognise circumstances in which another method is required. Such testing would bring together material practice, documentation and pedagogy without equating them. It would also reveal whether repair expertise is becoming shared or remaining concentrated in a few irreplaceable individuals. The cultural infrastructure exists not when every person can perform every repair, but when the conditions for learning, contesting and redistributing practical judgment remain publicly accessible.
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.
Anto Lloveras is an architect, artist and curator whose work spans physical construction, exhibition production, moving image and long-duration archives. Through LAPIEZA and Socioplastics, he investigates how maintenance, documentation and reuse shape cultural memory and the afterlife of artistic and architectural practices.
