Tag Archives: material culture

Inventive repair, or, the aesthetics of material hacks

Before disposability, before planned obsolescence, and even before mass production really entered its modern phase, there reined a different kind of material relation with broken objects. Waste historian Susan Strasser calls this ethos “stewardship,”  characterized by handwork, repair, and making do: “We are not likely to revive the stewardship of objects and materials, formed in […]
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Collecting? or Hoarding?

    Collections of Nothing, a book by William Davies King, is part memoir, part philosophical rumination about the meaning of collecting. King looks at the legacy of a life spent amassing…junk? random bits of debris? worthless trash? and wonders what it says about himself as an individual and about humanness more generally. Plenty of […]
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