( 1 ) Kintsugi is a traditional Japanese technique that mends broken pottery using a lacquer made from the sap of the urushi tree that is dusted with powdered gold, silver or platinum, accentuating the fractures.
On The MendCelebrating the aesthetics of repair.
On The MendCelebrating the aesthetics of repair.
Italian designer Martino Gamper drew bemused crowds during Milan Design Week in 2014 when he showcased different repair skills on the street in front of La Rinescente, the elegant department store. The exhibition, In a State of Repair, was equal parts performance, public service and statement, with Gamper demonstrating how various broken goods (ranging from bicycles and radios to clothing and musical instruments) could be resurrected. It was more intriguing, edifying and memorable than any new chair or lamp launched during the fair.
The decade since has seen a cultural embrace of repair. The pandemic gave us time to rediscover handy skills while the evident perils of overconsumption, combined with repeated cost-of-living crises, mean that more of us are mending and making do before buying new. Today, we celebrate repair in lofty exhibitions and reality TV series, kintsugi kits are sold on Instagram and visible mending classes are held in chain clothing stores.
A repaired object—whether a rebound book, a patched pair of jeans or a rehabbed building—gets a new chapter in its story that we have helped to write, and honoring this biographical process gives repair an anthropological power. David Chipperfield’s restoration of the Neues Museum in Berlin, for example, is compelling for the confident contrast between what is new and what remains; the building has been respectfully enhanced by a repair that is quietly celebratory, neither apologetic nor performative. We are coming around to the notion that repair has its own beauty and relationship with time; it is not so much about harking back to a better past or fixing a breakage in the present, as it is about scribing a future.
It stands to reason that the act of repair encourages us to engage with our buildings, clothing and belongings on a deeper level. As with people, when an object is broken, we get to see beneath the surface and its vulnerabilities are revealed. And the relationships we build with our things through repair have care at their core: We have invested something of ourselves in the act of mending and so we leave our mark—perhaps even with blood, sweat and tears.
