This work proposes a performative, participatory and poetic practice of collective actions of mending, during which we ‘repair’ the living environments of the participants in different ways.

These mendings can be historical, political, ecological, ethical, or symbolic in nature. They can draw on the practices of poetry, social activism, performance art, urban planning, anthropology, architecture, etc. The idea here is not to ‘teach’ the concepts and ideas of ‘repair’ (terms that are much used and problematized these days) but rather to invent and share imaginative, poetic, collective, metaphorical actions of healing and caring.

Mending the Invisible includes performative actions in public spaces, workshops with different local groups and associations, embroidering of a large scale “new” map of the repaired city, and a performance which narrates the actions and presents the map.

Nowadays we have mostly entrusted repair to experts and professionals (urban planners, maintenance workers, architects, infrastructure specialists, health professionals and technicians, lawyers and politicians), often overlooking and forgetting that repair is also something that is still in the process of building communities, not only part of everyday community relations, but also part of a community’s imagination of its future life.
Such repair cannot heal the wounds of our worlds but can maybe alter our individual and collective point of view on the experience of the common, orienting us more towards the lines of care and support. In this practice, we are therefore proposing a performative setting in which we will bring different people together to share various imaginations on collective mending / repair and which can continue for a longer period into unknown future.