Mending as a Practice of Interdependency

Mending as a Practice of Interdependency

by Amy Suo Wu

To mend is the gesture of gluing, stitching, connecting, and bonding damaged threads. These threads may have been broken due to violence, be it psychological, viral, emotional, physical, political, racial, institutional, or environmental. Starting from the idea of a rupture, participants reflect upon metaphorical mending while repairing a damaged textile ‘back together.’ In this meditative environment, participants can explore mending as a method and metaphor to reweave the ruptured connections to their senses and body, friends and family, to the material, social or ecological.

Mending is an embodied practice of stitching the ruptured binaries that have been violently torn apart over the course of hundreds of years by what bell hooks describes as an “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.”

This description evokes a reality of interlocking oppressive structures that have reorganized our worldview to uphold the belief of the false divisions and subsequent hierarchy between binaries such as head/heart, male/female, male/other, science/intuition, rational/emotion, design/craft, art/design, Western/non-Western, public/private and abstraction/lived experience, etc. As with many other institutions, art and design educational institutions have perpetuated these binaries, keeping the top denominations as superior, institutionalized forms of knowledge while denigrating the bottom denominations as unofficial and inferior. Using methods and activities to reflect upon ruptures of false binaries, we will together explore what it means to metaphorically and literally mend them. Mending can also be used to think through collaborative practices as ways to ‘stitch’ individual practices together.

  • A1 Taoist face wash
    • This exercise uses the hands to activate facial muscles through a series of movements around the eyes, nose, mouth, forehead, ears, back of the head, and neck area.
      The Taoist face wash is a simple exercise that has the ability to calm and relax the student’s body and tune into the sensorial universes. It is a great preparatory exercise that distributes consciousness from your head into the whole body by helping quiet the chatter of your thoughts. It can be used to transition into discussion or the (A2) sensorial mapping exercise. This exercise is from Pauline Oliveros’ book Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice.
    • Time frame: 30 mins
  • A2 Sensorial mapping
    • This exercise can be done in any safe environment. For example, it is well suited to a botanical garden or a similar site where it is safe to explore the sensorial universes of smell, sound, touch, and taste.
      Students are paired up; one of the two is blindfolded. The unblindfolded student guides the blindfolded student to what the unblindfolded student thinks might be interesting to touch, smell, taste, and/or hear. After ten minutes, the students swap roles, and the exercise repeats.
      Sensorial mapping is quite a powerful exercise. The simple gesture of deactivating one’s vision opens up other sensorial universes. Students have described the experience as awakening and, ironically, that they’ve felt more alive than they have in a long time as a result of shutting down their main sensory organs. The experience may activate fear, and learning to trust their partner becomes urgent. Students often speak of calmness, increased listening ability, and improved ability to digest theoretical readings afterwards. This exercise mends the connection to the body – shifting focus away from sight as a primary mode of navigation – and builds trust and reciprocity.
    • Time frame: ± 1hr
  • A3 Mending your partner’s damaged clothes
    • Students bring their damaged clothes or textiles into class. Then, in pairs, they swap and mend each other’s pieces, sharing with one another how their items were damaged and what kind of mend they want for the selection of textile.
      This exercise is to share stories about damage and care. It is an experimental talking cure that focuses on the social life of garments. The activity asks for active listening so that the other person’s mending needs are met, and trust and reciprocity are practiced. It also enacts craft as an embodied knowledge, whereby tacit knowledge roams freely. It is meditative.
    • Time frame: 1–2 hrs depending on skill and size of class
  • A4 Mending journey
    • Students think through rupture and repair and embark on a mending journey. Students can address ruptures of different natures, such as physical, identity-related, emotional, environmental, spiritual, political, or sensorial. The mending method is left open, but students should think about how their chosen mending technique symbolically relates to their mending journey. The mending approach can be literal or metaphorical, such as sewing, having a conversation, knitting, designing a game, creating a ritual, or whatever is meaningful in addressing their rupture. Students are encouraged to reflect on mending not necessarily to fix a problem but to think of it as a way to create future forms and possibilities. Mending decenters a type of making that starts from scratch. With environmental resources depleting rapidly, sustainable and responsible usage needs to be addressed. Because mending as making can be meditative due to the repetitive movement, it frees up more space for explorations that aren’t usually explored, such as getting in touch with one’s senses, developing reciprocity and care, and simply getting to know one’s classmates better. Mending can be used as a tool to build community within the classroom.This assignment also encourages students to think about mending as making. Students might use this class as an opportunity to transform failed assignments. Others might embrace the liberating feeling of making without the expectation of developing a grand concept about global issues. Many speak of the loss of creativity, joy, and play as a result of stifling perfectionism in an environment that strongly focuses on professionalism. Students could also use this space to work through ruptures of cultural and gender identity, family relations, mental health, and how these subjects relate to their learning experiences within educational institutions.
    • Time frame: 3 weeks
  • Women, Native, Other by Trinh T Minh- Ha
    ‘Third world’ feminist writer, filmmaker and academic who writes at the intersection of gender, class, and race.
  • Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
    A non-fiction work by this poet. This work has been foundational work in the reckoning of the Asian condition.
  • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
    Poetic non-fiction. His tender and unique voice carries us into his experience as a queer immigrant child of a war refugee.
  • Decolonisation as Care by Uzma Z. Rizvi
    A reflective essay on care, repair and the slowing of time
  • Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
    A classic book on teaching written by hooks. Written in the first-person perspective, the voice is powerful, immediate, and compelling.
  • Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective by Donna Haraway
    In defense of the situated subjectivity, as opposed to an abstract objectivity.
  • Frayed: Art and Textile Politics by Julia Bryan-Wilson
    A work on feminist, queer textile practices, with mostly North and South American examples.
  • Sick Women Theory by Johanna Hevda
    An influential essay on the condition of illness and queerness.
  • Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice by Pauline Oliveros
    A practical guide to listening and sounding by experimental composer Pauline Oliveros
  • Mending as a Practice of Interdependency by Amy Suo Wu
    A personal essay I wrote based on my reflections on the mending classes
    https://www.academia.edu/62612651/Situationer_Workbook_Cookbook
Photo of students standing in a circle with their mending pieces stitched together. The title in the center reads “Mending as a Practice of Interdependency”, using the typeface Apple Chancery in yellow. The image is framed with a stitched border in magenta, and the students’ faces are anonymized with magenta circles.
Mending as a Practice of Interdependency

Mending as a Practice of Interdependency by Amy Suo Wu is licensed with CC by 4.0

The mending course was developed by Amy Suo Wu in collaboration with Teana Boston-Mammah, Clara Balaguer, and Jan van Heemst for Bachelor students studying within the Cultural Diversity program at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam between 2018-2021.

Prior Knowledge and Preparation
I created this course based on my personal experience of needing to mend, which I detail in an essay titled ‘Mending as a Practice of Interdependency‘.

One important theme is the notion of ‘embodied knowledge‘, an understanding that without the bodily, we would not be able to organize ourselves in our environment: we would not know where/what we are, what/how we are learning or how we can communicate about our feelings, experiences, and modes of being. This position is a radical shift from an educational standard in which learning is centered around the mind and disembodied from the rest of the body. From a feminist and decolonial perspective, the act of reclaiming the body is resistance toward rational abstraction within the academy, one that can be seen as an institutional legacy of Enlightenment thinking. That is why we ask the students to begin where the senses start – that is, in our bodies – by interrogating how the body organizes our knowing, feeling, and being, and by extension, how that shapes our understanding of the way we gaze on our own bodies and those of others.

It might be helpful to familiarize oneself with the artistic practices and works of art by various artists that influenced this course. For example, I recommend looking at Yoko Ono’s ‘Mend piece‘, Lee Mingwei’s ‘Mending‘ project, Liz Collins’ ‘The Walking Wounded‘, and Michael Swaine’s ‘Free Mending Library‘. Some practices include Kintisugi – the Japanese art of repairing pottery and visible mending –, the practice of visible repair work. Furthermore, it would be helpful if teachers were familiar with feminist and critical pedagogical approaches. Practically, an understanding of basic sewing skills is useful.

Accessibility:
Assistance for Learners

This assignment has a low threshold in the sense that it can accommodate different levels of sewing skills, depending on the group of learners. The task can also be used as a method to serve discussion on similar subjects or other reflective activities.

Additional Tools

  • Zoom
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Other than devices to connect to the online learning environment (Zoom, Microsoft Teams), no extra digital hardware, software, or applications are needed. This workshop can, of course, take place offline too.