Since broken world thinking entails the need for repair, we use this as a methodological provocation to institute forms of rewilding that foreground new types of research and political affiliation that in being kin-centric are also closely intertwined with the technological as the paradigm that often mediates our relationship with the natural and non-human other.
Related to this, Enrique Salmón describes the Raràmuri’s concept of Iwígara, which advances both the understanding that everything in the worlds processes life or animism while simultaneously being entangled in a process of continued morphological change through living, dying, and transformation (Salmón 2000, p. 1327).
Indigenous social philosophies like the Rarámuri’s are important for, in calling for new modes of re-existence, it accounts for principles of reciprocity that instead of advancing a rhetoric of nature’s conservation underscores a system for the use of land through maintenance as on-going practice of care. In this regard, care signifies maintenance “as the relationship with the world” and that continuously “interconnects cycles of breath and life” (Salmón 2000, p. 1329).
To this idea of care through repair, Jackson adds that articulation as a form of maintenance “supports the smooth interaction of parts within complex sociotechnical wholes, adjusting and calibrating, sorting out ontologies on the fly rather than mixing and matching between fixed and stable entities. Articulation lives first and foremost in practice, not representation; as its proper etymology suggests, it’s a creature of bones, not words. When articulation fails, systems seize up, and our sociotechnical worlds become stiff, arthritic, unworkable” (Jackson 2014, p. 223).
While this idea of articulation as it stems from the need to maintain structures in place can be problematic, this leads us to ask about the role that art institutions and, more broadly, art systems can play in advancing forms of care. Can the art system foreground its own repair before attempting to repair the world outside its bounds?
More importantly, in the words of Jackson, how can we make “breakdown, maintenance, and repair confer special epistemic advantages in our thinking? Can the fixer know and see different things --indeed different worlds --that the better knowing figure of designer, creator, or user?”
These questions are at the heart of collective rewilding as we advocate for a rendering care as a departing principle for curatorial practice, we too cease to rely on maintenance as the untold and invisible labor that supports and upholding our structures, and into the labor and methods at the center of all other doing. In doing so, care shifts our attention from creating, innovation and production, into sustaining and sustainable processes, outcomes, and relationships.