Prácticas de Reparación a través del Arte y el Diseño

In the face of mounting ecological, political, and social crises, communities worldwide increasingly turn to art and design to repair damaged relations, sustain memory, and respond to harm when institutional mechanisms prove insufficient. Despite its growing presence across the humanities, social sciences, and design research, the concept of repair remains conceptually fragmented. Existing studies often describe what repair represents or achieves, but rarely analyse how it operates as a process through which understanding and social transformation may emerge_._ It has been invoked to describe responses to political violence, ecological collapse, technological failure, and social fragmentation. Yet, despite this proliferation, repair remains conceptually fragmented. Existing scholarship tends to frame repair either as an ethical stance, a symbolic act of restoration, or a practical activity of maintenance. What remains insufficiently examined is how repair operates, in art and design practices, as a process of knowledge formation grounded in situated and embodied activity. In this project, knowledge formation refers to the generation of shared and transmissible ways of making sense of harm, responsibility, and coexistence that arise through material engagement, collective action, and relational practice. While legal and political frameworks of reparation address measurable loss, they are organised around modes of evidence and recognition that restrict what can be known and articulated about immaterial, relational, and affective dimensions of harm. Likewise, studies in the arts, anthropology, and design often document creative gestures of repair but rarely analyse how these practices function as processes through which understanding is produced, shared, or transformed.

The relationship between art and design practices and processes of knowledge and justice has yet to be articulated through a consolidated analytical framework grounded in the practices themselves. This proposal addresses this problem through the following research question: How do art and design practices generate and transmit reparatory knowledge through embodied and relational processes, and how might this knowledge inform understandings of justice beyond institutional reparation? In this project, reparatory knowledge refers to situated and collectively generated forms of understanding that emerge through embodied and material practices engaging with experiences of harm. From this perspective, the relation between justice and knowledge becomes a central analytical problem: how experiences of injustice are rendered intelligible, communicable, and actionable through non-institutional forms of art and design practice.