Fragilities:
Essays on the Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Maintenance and Repair
MIT PRESS, 2024
Edited by Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis and David Pontille
This edited volume was born as an invitation to think with the notion of fragility. The central idea is that fragility y forces us to reckon with precariousness and contingency of life, and that such reckoning can be used as a starting point to build and nurture life-affirming politics and ethics.
The essays in the collection explore how the work of care, maintenance, and repair compose with, rather than struggle against, fragilities. They do so through four categories—bodies, environments, labor, and politics—and proposes to consider in each situation what/who is rendered visible, what/who is made absent, what is considered normal, and what is deemed strong and stable versus what is deemed fragile.
Still Life:
Ecologies of the modern imagination at the Art Museum
Chicago University Press, 2020
This is a book about the fragility of presence, about entropy, about the fact that everything that exists will eventually cease to be, and about how difficult it is to accept this fundamental fact of life.
The book centers around the museum, one of the most fabulous machines ever created to deny this fragility.It starts with the premise that a museum is not a collection of objects but a collection of slowly unfolding disasters. Despite the spectacle of stillness and permanence that the museum offers, every single art object that we encounter in its rooms is slowly inching toward its own disappearance, becoming undone, deteriorating, cracking, oxidizing, and breaking apart. The book explores the unnatural ecologies that need to be engineered and sustained to keep art objects alive and "imaginable" as such. It does so by delving into the vast, yet largely uncharted, geography of spaces that the museum hides beyond the exhibition room—such as the conservation lab, the storage facility, and the machine room—and by following some of the actors and forms of labor that populate those spaces who have been left out of the main narratives of art because they have been considered to be without political, aesthetic, or historical value.
Through this exploration, the book reveals the massive economic and environmental costs required to maintain the unnatural ecologies that keep art objects alive, and raises the question of how far we, as a society, are willing to go, and how much in material and economic resources, time, and labor we are willing to invest in the name of keeping the modern imagination of art alive.
Awards & Distinctions:
2021 Mary Douglas Book Prize for Still Life awarded by the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association (NEW)
2021 Book prize for Still Life of the ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
2021 Honorary Mention in Robert K Merton Award, for Still Life awarded by the Science, Technology and Society section of the American Sociological Association. (NEW)
2021 Shortlisted as one of the four finalists for the Horowitz Book Prize awarded by the Bard Graduate Center.
The Politics of Knowledge
Routledge, 2012
Edited by Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Patrick Baert
This volume brings together the work of a number of scholars who, in various ways, seek to reconceptualize the relationship between politics and knowledge. In direct contrast to the optimistic Enlightenment ideal that viewed knowledge as a cumulative process that gradually advanced by dispelling previous areas of ignorance, these authors explore how contemporary knowledge has emerged, instead, as a Janus-faced phenomenon where every piece of new knowledge is invariably accompanied by uncertainties and risks that must be politically governed and managed.
The volume examines how this Janus-faced nature challenges the widespread and influential "liberal view" oragnized around a normative separation between politics as the sphere of values—with how the world ought to be—and knowledge as the sphere of facts—with how the world actually is. The volumes proposes a reconceptualization of this relationship centered on the ontological dimensions of knowledge; that is, its generative capacity to produce new entities and relations in the world.
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