CONTENTS

1. COMPOSTING THE SYSTEM

   By Alexandra Hammond

2. LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

   A conversation with Julian Watkins, MD

3. WE ARE ANTS

   A conversation with Guadalupe Garcia,
   Founder of the ANT project

4. SECRET RIVER, GARBAGE LAND

   A conversation with Cody Herrmann
   and Julian Louis Phillips

We are living through both the devastating fall of systems that guarantee life, and the necessary fall of systems that uphold violence.” − adrienne maree brown, post-nationalist writer, doula, activist and Black feminist

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. 

In this issue of PUSH/PULL, I sought to deepen my relationship with a handful of inspiring members of my community including Guadalupe Garcia (art historian, curator and founder of The Ant Project), Julian Watkins MD (health equity advisor at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in the Center for Health Equity and member of the city’s COVID-19 taskforce) and artists Julian Louis Phillips and Cody Herrmann, who each practice a mix of sculpture, performance, and social engagement, and happen to be partners. I was curious to hear about how their distinct art practices are influenced by their relationship. 

Practicing curiosity and listening with my interlocutors, I touched colorful worlds of shared experience and divergence. Editing the transcripts of our conversations, I was moved by their profundity, creativity, and clarity. Independently, they each articulated love as the engine driving them to stir up and transform broken systems — from public health, to art institutions, to policing. Big thanks to my interviewees and to Culture Push for co-creating this project. As we say at Boa’s Repair Shop, let’s compost our system.

— Alexandra Hammond, Boa’s Repair Shop