Tinker Town: Brokenness is Openness, 2015
Museum of Contemporary Art
Family Day Workshop
Chicago, IL
with Raewyn Martyn
Tinker Town: Brokenness is Openness, was a workshop created for child participants at the MCA’s Family Day. Raewyn Martyn and Sara Black created an open landscape of full scale tables adjacent to an area on the floor filled with disassembled and broken doll house parts and furniture as well as many tools for construction (tape, glue, nails, etc). Child participants were invited to playfully ‘repair’ the houses, generating a rich array of creative and imaginative renovations that were constantly being done and redone in collaboration with others. The following prompt was made available to children and guardians:
You are welcome to join a table, and using the materials provided, repair and reassemble parts of this collection of disassembled and broken dolls houses. We’ve been thinking about “tinkering” as an ongoing process of playful repair. This tinkering creates opportunities to explore and understand your own impulses to play, repair, reinvent, develop, adapt, and reconfigure. Brokenness can reveal the material of things, and once we think of things as material we notice that brokenness is also openness. In a broken state, things are open to change.
