#100daysitp

Some time ago, Donna Haraway skyped into a room full of people at the opening of Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2017) at the Performance Space New York , a documentary portrait of her and an introduction to a book that she has edited with Adele Clark called Making Kin not Population. It is a series of essays by feminist scholars pushing for new and modified practices of forming family and, discussions concerning population growth and the advocacy of ‘making kin.’ During the discussion with Haraway and a subsequent talk by Kim Tallbear who has contributed to the book with essay Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family, notions of care and alternative means of making kin (regardless of blood relation) were spoken about in depth.

Fast forward to a month ago, I attended a workshop lead by Ed Bear, artist, engineer, performer and researcher who introduced us to the concept of kin/intimacy in relation to trash/repair. During the workshop we spoke about the relationship that humans have specifically to e-waste; how technology and its waste flows and streams are coupled & tied to historical systems of violent domination. Additionally, he taught us how to get a power generator that is seemingly broken to function again. In my notes from the workshop: “Breaking through the alienation of electronics might involve things that are scare and things that we are not meant to be doing…[such as fucking with cables and being prone to electric shocks] and this leads to needing to have an awareness and intimacy with the objects we are tinkering with. Also, how can we mourn objects/things/electronics?”  We also questioned and discussed why people/we think something is ‘broken.’ In the workshop, I strengthened my understanding that our relation to objects goes far beyond their materiality. I think the moment that I took away the most was when Ed took out a dirty DMX light that he said he’d found on the street and instructed us that the first step to repairing a piece of trash (such as a dmx light, or a television) was to clean it. And he started cleaning it with a cloth and spray; this act made me think again of the notion of care. Repairing things is often frustrating for me — an object that is not working in the way that it was prescribed to work (such as a phone not connecting to a network) seems to always cause a sense of aggravation and impatience…. what does it mean to treat the object with care….?What does it mean to treat your iphone with care? How does this make your hyper-aware of your relationship towards it. Here are my notes from the workshop.

And then…. fast forward to Rome, where I have been for the break and I am sitting on some church stairs - I notice a man, who later introduced himself to me as Nello, sitting in front of a shoebox that is behaving as a pedestal for a couple of plastic bottles, an empty champagne bottle container, coffee cups and other pieces of ‘trash’.

He had cleaned all these items, and was selling them. When I spoke to him, he described to me the various affordances that each object had:

the champagne bottle container could hold a series of tennis balls, the little plastic bowl is a perfect egg beater for when you want to make yourself breakfast...what used to be a sushi box could be perfect storage for jewels and trinkets. Nello is from New York but grew up in Naples and I found him to be making an extremely important and political act, that wasn’t coated in critical theory jackets or enclosed within the context of a performative arts practice... I suggested that he might create paper captions with his descriptions to aid his sale. 

Could a synonym of care be ‘maintenance’? What does it mean to maintain? I have often thought about city streets, and public spaces as living rooms…a living room managed and maintained by different kinds of bodies; singular, collective, bureaucratic, subordinate. Thus, the last couple of outputs that I made were trying to draw similitude between the maintenance of the body and the maintenance of city infrastructure. What does it mean to care for the streets? What does it mean to care for spaces that we enjoy? What does it mean to care for a public space that is unseen for example? What differences are drawn in the care we give to spaces that we take for granted in its utmost functionality, such as a sidewalk? Who is in charge of maintaining it?

Of most interest to me has been this page on the department of sanitation’s website & Cleaning laws of streets and sidewalks.

Exercise/Output for tomorrow: Go collect the debris and clean a space that is ‘unseen’ in the city. Like one would clean underneath a couch when cleaning their living room.

Other links:

Code ecologies github repo: https://github.com/SFPC/codeecologies/tree/master/program