Wool Sucker (Teaser)
A film from Boa’s Repair Shop.
Boa’s Repair Shop offers workshops to repair physical objects and metaphysical states of being.
Caring for objects — which are imbued with human labor, supply chains and raw materials — is caring for each other, Earth, and ourselves.
Boa’s Repair Shop facilitates repairing as an act of love and connection for people of all backgrounds.
The purpose of the project is to reimagine our collective relationship with brokenness itself. Now more than ever, we are aware of the many ways our world is wounded: ecological systems collapsing; nations divided economically, ideologically, and from one another; institutions built on morally and materially toxic footings.
Boa’s Repair Shop positions this brokenness as an invitation into being with, finding compassion for self and other, choosing to stay and contend. It offers the possibility of “composting” the detritus of broken systems and ways of being to grow structures that are liberatory and supportive. By centering objects as connected with the metaphysical, psychological, and systemic, Boa’s Repair Shop produces embodied experiences that demonstrate how abstract concepts and stories impact our physical, embodied world, and vice versa.
As a Utopian Practice Fellow with Culture Push in 2020 and 2021, I developed Boa’s Repair Shop’s first public workshops, including Menditation, a combination of mending and meditation, and Flag Repair, a workshop where we approach the construction of a flag from the inside out, creating a collective flag with symbols generated by each participant. A grant from the New York State Council for the Arts has allowed me to plan upcoming workshops in collaboration with other artists who bring theoretical knowledge and hands-on skills in areas such as natural dyes and pigments and end of life counseling.
Above all, Boa’s Repair Shop is a project about relationships: among ideas, emotions and objects; self, other and community; a sense of wholeness, brokenness and the unsteady territory of transformation.
On the most basic level, this project draws groups of strangers together to experience how imagination and physical being are braided together and rooted into the diversity of experiences that constitute our collective life-world of Earth.