Maintenance, Care, and Repair of a Communal Architecture in Trouble: The Disassembling
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Abstract
This paper attempts to ethnographically reflect on how material vulnerability is conceived and considered in practices of communal sustenance of architectures in trouble. Drawing on theories of maintenance, care, and repair, we will dwell on the learnings cultivated during a socio-material process that unfolded in response to the burning of a communal library in the southern periphery of the city of Bogotá. The collective practices of sustenance deployed to take care of the threatened architecture help us bring to the forefront questions of (I) distributed agency and ecology of practices; (II) unanticipated future and alternative temporalities; (III) creative and generative responses to damage or conflict; as well as (V) tentative and (IV) ‘opening of black boxes’ methods. Through the ethnographic analysis of the disassembling process, we will problematize the socio-material ecosystems needed to sustain lives in a ‘broken world’.
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