Matters of Material Maintenance

Teresa Dillon, Artist & Professor of City Futures at the School of Art & Design, UWE, Bristol

“Matters of Material Maintenance” focuses on artistic practices that work at the ‘break point’ of material and technological failure. When things break down, the web of forces (Bennet, 2009) that connects things, to other things is revealed. This in turn demands that we pay attention to how stuff is made in the first place. For when we engage in acts of repair, we are confronted with questions not only about the primary commodities that constitute an objects’ make up, but also tap into the labour conditions, distribution channels, access to spare parts and the costs and skills available to repair an object. Such emphasises engages a form of broken world thinking (Jackson, 2014), where processes of erosion, breakdown, glitch, and decay, as opposed to the new and novel, become the starting points, for rethinking a broader political ecology of stuff. Placing specific attention on media art practices, this talk explores what it means to work the ‘break point’ and how such art making, connects not only to other fields of critical research but also provides pointers for how we may transition to more circular societies and regenerative material matters.

Teresa Dillon is an artist, researcher and Professor of City Futures at the School of Art, UWE, Bristol. Since the early 2000s her work has focused on techno-civic entanglements, with an emphasises on notions of survival, relationality and connectivity.

Recent works include the documentary ‘Turning the Collar’, which follows the working lives of professional repairers (2022) and audio-visual installations, including remembrance architectures for extinct species, 'Go Deo' (2022), and 'They Gathered Rushes'' (2023) an archival reenactmentment of recipes using bog plants. Recent publications including Grounding Technologies (2023), Working the Break Point v.2 (2023); Tales of Care and Repair, Stories of Everyday Maintenance (2022) and The Practice of Multispecies Relations in Urban Space and Its Potentialities for New Legal Imaginaries (2021).

Since 2013, Teresa as organised Urban Hosts, a program of talks and workshops that explores conversational formats for promoting and provoking alternatives to city living and in 2018, established Repair Acts, a pluralistic artist-led research programme that explores repair, maintenance, and healing cultures.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Palatine Centre • Durham University, Stockton Road, Durham, United Kingdom