Mending and Resting – An Exploration of Resting and Mending as Entangled Practices of Resistance and Reciprocity
Mesting and Rending is an exploration of Mesting (mending + resting) and Rending (resting + mending) as entangled radical, relational, and restorative practices in response to capitalist systems that demand constant productivity, efficiency and growth, and therefore erase slow and cyclical rhythms.
In a world where resting and mending is often treated as personal responsibilities, carried out in private, and valued only for its ability to restore function, we ask:
“What if your rest was my rest and my mending was yours?And if rest is relational, how do we make space for each other’s rest?”
collective mending over the question what if your rest was my rest and my mending was yours
Through collective gatherings, metadesign tools, autoethnographic reflection and undisciplined collaborations, we work with the intertwined practices of Mesting and Rending, both as a methodology and as a way of imagining other ways of living and embodying.
resting the weight of the unreliable body in a piece of unreliable fabric mended by many hands before
The library of Mesting and Rending
As a response to the question of how we could lend, borrow, receive, give and take resting and mending, the unreliable library of Mesting and Rending, proposes a soft infrastructure, that not only holds physical materials, such as zines, games, mending patches and tools,… but also invites for Mesting and Rending on the spot while imagining how we could stretch the concept of a library beyond material exchange.
By facilitating spaces like the Library of Mesting and Rending, that are soft, slow and gentle interventions, we aim to challenge the individualisation and commercialisation of (self-) care, resting, and mending. We engage with different entities across contexts, human, non-human and other-than-human, part of diverse publics and privates, visibilities and invisibilities. In the intervention of the library, the materials and non-materials are borrowed, received, taken and thus entering the private sphere, transcending boundaries between public and private.
The library is a living organism, inviting to take and give, borrow and lend. These acts are shaped/guided by soft infrastructure within the library. Library Cards inviting to tell stories, Language Making tool to experience and think of new and other ways of resting, mending and being and a Glossary for giving meaning to the new and other ways of resting, mending and being.
printed matter serving as software facilitating Mesting and Rending explorations
”(soft) hardware of the library creating platform of collective shared experience and reciprocity
an ephemeral moments of an act of giving to the library through writing and stamping the library card
