BREAKFIX

BREAKFIX is based on the principles of the Japanese art of kintsugi, namely that breakage and repair are part of an object’s history and should not be concealed. BREAKFIX is a duo with many bodies, a performance at once personal and anonymous, intimate and calling the absent. It’s a story that stutters and breaks, with pieces missing, creating holes in the archive, in the flesh, in the mind.

Drawing on imaginaries of repair in psychology, the work wonders how we survive what breaks us, and how we reconstruct meaning after rupture. What emerges is a fragile, provisional, and continuously re-created landscape (of texts and objects) that echoes loss and resilience. Here, repair is not a return to what was but the act of creating something new. Of finding moments of respite even when things go wrong, again and again.

The concept of ‘broken’ is highly subjective. The healing process is also a personal experience. For some, dysfunction can offer a sense of freedom that is in itself a form of recovery. Do we function better when everything runs smoothly, or do we feel most alive when things are unstable, uncertain and tentative?

The inspiration for this project stems from Nada Gambier’s earlier research into restorative justice and gentle intervention methods, from Wabi-Sabi (the Japanese philosophy that celebrates the ageing process with the motto ‘nothing lasts forever, nothing is complete and nothing is perfect’) and from Jeremy Hutchison’s work Err.