Between 1 – 3 September Repair Society: Ringvägen manifested itself as a public space for research, workshops, talks and presentations at Forum for Architecture in Stockholm.

Under leadership from course leader Magnus Ericson and Joanna van der Zanden, independent curator and creative director on cross-disciplinary (social) design projects, we developed formats to explore the topic of what society would look like if repair had a central role in our lives, in our thinking and acting.

We related to repair from both a material perspective, and a wider, social perspective, as a way of bridging old and new, past and future – a sensitive way of thinking about relations, social systems, urban development and future forms of society.

The research included the mapping of local repair skills, as well as interviews with the local residents around repair. Topics ranged from gentrification and local resilience, to the repair of the body-mind connection through yoga and meditation, to the lived experience of how the “throw away”-mentality has lead to age discrimination in the search for the “new and shiny” in the workplace.

The program invited in a range of professionals from the nonprofit, art, architecture and activist scene. Along with product designer Jonatan Lennman, I arranged and moderated the talk “Repair and the social”, inviting in two local nonprofits repairing and selling objects with the help of people with a history of drug abuse or long-term unemployment. We discussed topics like: How do you repair people? How is the material doing of repair connected to the repair of self-esteem, loneliness, a missing sense of community? We also moderated a talk with a curator from the art center Färgfabriken in Stockholm, to discuss their repair of the missing communication links between art, politics, urban planning and architecture.

In addition, the program included a “Museum of Repair”, displaying and honoring objects fixed or created from waste material, as well as a “Repair it together”, a workshop where we ate waffles and matched repair skills and needs.