In this one hour workshop we will mend your broken garments as a ritual practice. Bring one garment in need of mending. We will provide thread, needles and assorted buttons. Together, we will enter into sensory relationship with our garments, allowing ourselves to be permeated by their material and energetic qualities and conducting physical and metaphysical repairs in relationship with our garments, ourselves and each other.
Background
The Two Bridges section of the Lower East Side is home to myriad stores and workshops that specialize in repair and refreshment: get your shoes, belts and bags fixed on the sidewalk at the southeast corner of East Broadway and Rutgers; get your bike fixed at the shop on Canal and Allan; fix your hunger at countless restaurants and groceries; and refresh your health at the herb shops along East Broadway.
Repairing is happening all around us as the city puts people in proximal relationship with each other to regenerate life. As the city reopens from the Covid-19 pandemic, recognizing and engaging with cultures of repair is central to collective healing. The practice of sewing follows a long lineage of garment work in this neighborhood, threading through tenement piecework shops to Chinese import boutiques and the self-styled youth fashions of Dimes Square.
About Alexandra Hammond, Culture Push Fellow
Alexandra Hammond’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, installation and conversational performances. She believes that all beings, objects and Earth inter-are and inter-be. This repositioning of the individual acknowledges that we are part of everything. There is only connection. This perspective calls us to move from extractive modes of operation to caring, maintenance and repairing.
Boa’s Repair Shop offers free workshops for the repair of physical objects and metaphysical states of being. Breaking is a normal part of embodied life and physical existence, from marriages to plates to self-worth. It sometimes marks the end of life in one particular form. Other times, it catalyzes repair or reinvention. Caring for objects (which are imbued with human labor, networks of supply chains and raw materials) means caring for each other, Earth and ourselves. We facilitate repair, digestion, and reinvention in alignment with the ecological principle of the conservation of matter.