Publisher: Kurziv, Zagreb
Editor: Hana Sirovica
Design and layout: Ana Labudović
Print: Riso and Friends, Rijeka
From the editor’s introduction:
On Repair
The Booklet of Reparative Practices emerges from a series of creative collaborations initiated by three cultural organizations from Croatia (Kurziv), Slovenia (Maska), and Poland (Krytyka Polityczna). During the past two years, we joined forces in a project called Repair, in an attempt to explore, test and produce “reparative approaches”. These approaches, open to surprising and unexpected outcomes – motivated by joy and pleasure rather than fear or anxiety – seek ways to address various systemic issues that burden relationships within culture and society, as well as relations to the environment and the future.
The booklet begins with explanations of, why and how and in regard to what we sought to act reparatively, followed by a selection of method proposals that stem from our exploration. We hope it can serve as an encouragement, an invitation to and for reparative practice.
[…]
The Who and the What (or the Humans and the Topics)
The Booklet of Reparative Practices is based on work of six teams, who researched and tested various modes of collaboration, creating shared spaces for testing different reparative strategies of co-thinking, co-creating and co-acting – both in online and offline forms; of long-lasting and open-ended and limited duration.
Our community was interdisciplinary by design, joining artists, producers, curators and organizers, dramaturgs, scientists, editors, writers, journalists and critics, educators, activists. Some of the collaborative processes were initiated in a more “artificial” manner (by work of organizing, joining people by curation, either via open calls or by invitation), others were already stemming organically (by including self-organized collectives who existed prior to our project, and providing means and conditions for work).
This is an assemblage based on the findings of these researchers, who explored a seemingly very diverse range of issues and phenomena, ranging from highly site-specific topics (such as wetland environments in urban surroundings) to more elusive cultural phenomena such as anomaly, failure, pleasure or future. The processes were also grounded differently, some of them oriented toward specific topics, others grasping the methodological or meta level. Namely, our focuses were pointed at different sets of relations: relations within and around the cultural and arts ecosystem, gendered dimensions of social relations, human relations to more-than-human environments, and relations to the future.
While this may seem very, if not too broad at first glance, it’s important to stress that all of these processes share a common ground, as each end every one of them is rooted in the aspiration to transcend the status quo and joint by an effort to intervene in our immediate surroundings by creating micro-pockets of resistance, and importantly, by initiating and encouraging collaborations between the individuals who are active in diverse, usually even separate contexts, trying to step outside of what is expected and to step out of comfort zone.
[…]
Why This Booklet IS About You
You will notice that the methods are not formulated as traditional methods in the sense of providing clear instructions; rather, they are conceived as a series of prompts for thought and action. Or, to put it in more everyday terms: the purpose of this booklet as a whole, as well as the method section, is not to serve as a cookbook with recipes that can be used in any and every kitchen. Instead, it is more like a flexible and adaptable collection of thoughts and procedures, questions, and suggestions, whose ingredients can be incorporated into various recipes depending on the type of kitchen and the tools you have. We tried to make them adaptive and to various practices and collaborations, within culture and beyond. They are designed as a call to reparative action, meant to encourage reflection on how we work and what we can do within our means.
(When possible. When it’s not possible, trying to imagine the conditions under which it would be possible is highly recommended!)