Acts of mending and maintenance are the subject of the Fix: Care and Repair exhibition in Helsinki, Finland. Here, its curators share five works that shed light on a rarely celebrated topic.
The Fix: Care and Repair exhibition brings together objects and artworks that tell a story about shifting social attitudes towards repair.
"The way we treat broken objects reveals something about us and our society," said co-curator Kaisa Karvinen. "Do we consider repairing real work" Do we consider a repaired object beautiful" Do we prefer to repair something, or do we throw it away and replace it with something new""
The Fix: Care and Repair exhibition is on at Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum in Helsinki. Photo by Paavo Lehtonen The exhibition is the first to bring together curators from both the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum Helsinki, which merged at the start of this year and will soon share a new building on the city's South Harbour.
Karvinen told Dezeen that the curators' thinking during the exhibition development was influenced by the work of two writers, Shannon Mattern and Hilary Sample.
Mattern argued for the need to make care and maintenance ? instead of innovation ? our dominant way of thinking about the world, while in her book Maintenance Architecture, Sample made the case for maintenance as a part of architecture.
However, choosing what objects to display to explore these ideas was not straight...