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MAINTENANCE AS CRAFT

finalist proposal for the Venice biennale of architecture 2016 Belgium pavilion:

Text: Koen Berghmans

Illustration: Bernardo Robles Hidalgo

Translation from Dutch to English: Livia Cahn

"I don't get why people don't like to clean. Is there any better way to get to know a house?"

(M.T., architect and housewife.)

Maintenance can teach us architects a lot about matter, time and space.

The direct relationship we uphold with material through maintenance sustains us and is all together different than a functional relationship to materials. It’s more intuitive. In part also because of the object itself. On every level, frequent maintenance is necessary, from the dusty mantelpiece, to a roof tile damaged by wind and rain. (In the original Dutch proposal the comparison was made between a cupboard and a complete building, referring to the difference in scale.) Maintenance ensures that we feel good in a space, with the objects we use.

Maintenance is ephemeral. It's done, and needs to happen again and again, requiring time and attention. We learn it as we go along. It’s therefore seemingly antagonistic to durability, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Although it is invisible to an outsider, maintenance nevertheless contributes to their experience. It's sensorial. It evaporates, like the smell of bleach after mopping. Or it is slippery like a brown soaped floor. Maintenance says something about the way we use available resources.

A particular form of maintenance is housekeeping. In Dutch "Huishouden" ("Huishouden" is best translated as housekeeping) means as much as management or government, but applied to the use of space we could understand it as the maintenance of and inside built space. Popular wisdom tells us that household chores take place in the intimate environment of one's own home. "Huishouden" (in this sentence "huishouden" could be translated as household) also stands for domicile, but it's meaning can also reach further, consider water management for example. Lastly, "huishouden" equally means wreaking havoc, like a destructive hurricane approaching a mass of land. This word merges people and a very particular, yet momentous experience of space.

Housekeeping has its own logic. The one of the experience expert that is. We see chaos in other’s order and just like zero management in a nature reserve, not maintaining and simple use is also a form of housekeeping. Nothing is as personal as housekeeping. And nothing is as intimate. Housekeeping is what we rarely grasp consciously, though certainly unconsciously. It is nestled in your very being, by imitation, repetition and habituation.

When we talk about housekeeping, everyone obviously wants to achieve good work. You, yourself are the objective standard for it, after all. We maintain the space as if it were our body and many take care of it with more love. Housekeeping is a craft or as Sennett says (Richard Sennett is the author of the book The Craftsman, which inspired my definition of 'crafts(wo)manship'), we do it better as a craft.

ex: ""Craftsmanship" may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society - but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stands in the way of the craftsman's discipline and commitment ... The argument here is that motivation matters more than talent, and for a particular reason. ... We are more likely to fail as craftsmen, I argue, due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability."

(Prologue : Man as His Own Maker. In : SENNET, R. 2008. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 9-11)

But there are threats posed to that possible craftsmanship.

A craft is not work or work is not the same as a craft. A professional service doesn't mean craftsmanship per se. Although a craftsman is often presented as the alternative for clumsy do-it-yourself repair, this is not valid for maintenance. We do things better ourselves when we don't just want to get rid of it. On the labour market a craftsman stands for competent. Competences are written in CV's, but for many jobs in the maintenance sector, specific skills are rarely required. Maintenance is made to look like an easy task, which can be done by people with low skills, without papers, long-term unemployed, ... Seemingly anyone with a weaker position in society and often it turns out to be women. Just to say something, undocumented women on the breadline have it easier to find a job than their husbands.

Work is what we do to earn money to pay access to the means we need. This is somewhat strange if one considers that everything is already at hand. Influenced by the environmental movement we learnt to look at the world as if it were finite. That's evident, but "handige" commercial "harry's" ("Handige harry" is a Dutch word for handyman, often used as the name of a character in children's television series) also use it to promote scarcity and 'scarcity' is everywhere. According to the Lauderdale Paradox rentseekers will always try to pursue profit out of it. And good work is scarce too. Today it is a good which we consume at lower prices and slackened working conditions. The labour market translates 'crafts(wo)manship' to crafts - m/f - ship.

Professionalisation often sounds good, but since full employment became the norm, we pay a bigger price to consume work. The intimate sphere is usually the last one to be professionalised. Something as personal as maintaining a house is fixed in norms and tasks to tick off on the checklist by a certificated housekeeper. Some people clean once a week, others every day. The smell of Belpol and oiled sawdust in my parent’s garage still lingers on. Fragmentation of tasks and responsibilities in more diverse, temporary jobs by companies with practical codes of good practice takes the soul out of housekeeping. An activation labour policy with the help of "titres services" (service vouchers), employment of art.60's and the reinvented idea of alternative citizen service run the risk of hollowing it out even further. In Belgium the sector of domestic help has the less worked out social agreements. In the Netherlands housekeep-st-ers (the word 'housekeep-st-er' refers to females doing the housekeeping as the word in Dutch is written differently for males, "huishouder", and females, “huishoudster") have their own parliament. (In order to defend their labour conditions female housekeepers from the Netherlands created their own union called "Huishoudparlement".)

Work frames life and many domestic tasks are outsourced, because people go to work and because there are people who want to. We let housekeeping slip from our hands. We loose the process of learning a skill and consequently we don't pass it on ourselves anymore, but we do it through "De gouden raad van Tante Kaat" and "Ons Kookboek" ("De gouden raad van Tante Kaat" and "Ons Kookboek" are popular handbooks in the Flanders that also exist in a version on the internet. An American variant is the women's magazine Good Housekeeping). What next if even two housekeep-st-ers do not clean their own house, but each other’s and respectively pay each other with "titres services"?

We would loose our mind and senses for less than this and that is what is essential to craftsmanship. Exactly that motivation is such an important partner in delivering good work.

And yet it doesn't have to be like this. Let's act on everything that is, watch the world through a lens of abundance and not throw the baby out with the bathwater yet. Let us take on the role of the bonus pater familias at home and learn from all those housewives, cleaning and toilet ladies and all other handy(wo)men. Let us further develop what is already there as managers of this planet and beyond, starting from that one not yet mentioned, extraordinary multi-tasking role with that very own relationship with the built space : the janitor.

THE JANITOR OF THE BIENNALE

A janitor belongs to the same "Comité Paritaire" (Joint Committee) as domestic workers, but differs in many ways from the household workers. Firstly, he or she is a worker and not an employee. This implies a few things; a janitor is not behind closed doors and has a more autonomous position. The janitor is positioned somewhere between owner and tenants and as a kind of go-between that is always available to both parties. Where the housekeep-st-er is often considered by children as some kind of surrogate mother who does anything for them, the janitor is more like a mayor leading a specific sort of local democracy. One who could ask all house inhabitants through a three-option-poll for their opinion on new personalised mail boxes and then finally cut the knot himself. The private life of the janitor merges with the public one. His or her housekeeping is that of the building. Finally where housekeeping is often associated with women's work, this is not the case for the janitor. Janitors are often assisted by others, often by their partners. Of course it's not all rosey, the job of a janitor is not that self-evident. An obsessive ability often leads to tormented crafts(wo)manship and very stubborn janitors. We are all human, but there are definitely a lesson or two to learn here. As ultimate manager of his or her immediate environment, the janitor is linked to that environment in many possible ways. A little bit like the sha(wo)man in the wood or like the priest(ess) who cares for the temple and honours it through a ritual on the material in order to understand what's behind it. Seen from many perspectives, abundance is present and the time has come to also see it like that. Maybe by behaving like it. According to many indigenous peoples we only experience abundance when we are in balance and vice versa. Just like they feel at one with their environment, we can experience the same in our built surroundings. After all there's no difference.

This proposal for the Belgian pavilion is to be curated by a team that behaves like a janitor. In the period between the dismantlement of the Venice Art Biennale 2015 and the construction of the Architecture Biennale, traces of maintenance will be collected throughout daily activities in, on and around the building and by extension in the whole Giardini. The Belgian pavilion will act as a base. The process of maintenance will be followed up closely and eventually put on hold for nearer observation and exhibited in the same space which is conceived to. All of this will be done in close co-existence with the other inhabitants of the Giardini during this transition period. Simultaneously research will be conducted on the context of the practice of maintenance. In fact this proposal aims to mirror the personal wisdom that can be obtained in the same way that maintenance is carried out. In order to show that, we will highlight the ways in which this is made public : labour regulations and protocols, codes of good practice, but also instruments and communication tools like 'Attention ! Slippery.'-signs as well as more sensorial experiences like a repeatedly temporary dangerously shiny floor. All these elements will form the base of another, wider and more personal frame of reference for the architect. Not because of nostalgia, but for another status for the janitor today and by extension everyone who 'keeps house'.

Koen Berghmans will carry the main responsibility and will be surrounded by international team members whose home bases are Brussels.

The project is interpreted according to the logic of the Potential Office Project (POP). This platform of architects, artists and others takes action with those who are available at a given moment, quite aside of their competences, driven by their temporary engagement.

Other members are Agency, Elke Gutiérrez-Burgos (experienced expert social worker with undocumented domestic workers, informal caregivers and identity politics), Anna Rispoli (performance artist) and Livia Cahn (researcher, anthropologist), Giulia Caterina-Verga (architect) and Bernardo Robles Hidalgo (architect) for O O O.

'Crafts(wo)manship' and the built space, Open call Belgian Pavilion Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, VAi

Text: Koen Berghmans

Illustration: Bernardo Robles Hidalgo

Translation from Dutch to English: Livia Cahn

15.1.2020