Finding ways in turbulent times
Future Beyond Repair ("FBR") is an independent research journal about materiality, regeneration, tactics, openness, and futures.
I set up FBR in November 2024 as a subsection of my website, with an initial collection of recent texts. It was created to hold space for reconnecting with and going beyond earlier projects, in an attempt to overcome the limitations of our ways of seeing things in these turbulent times.
Have a read at the texts here, and feel free to contact me to discuss these and other ideas.
Posted on 9th Dec 2024
The accelerated and unchecked pace of development of digital technologies is notably problematic. International Organisations like the United Nations are increasingly describing the ill implications of technologies to be as challenging as the effects of climate change. These are indeed intertwined m...
Posted on 7th Dec 2024
From my typewriter series. Berlin, 07.12.24 trabalho consentido X trabalho com sentido
Posted on 5th Dec 2024
We live in times of crises. Not a single crisis, but multiple, plural, and interconnected ones. Environmental degradation causing extreme climate events. The severance of social bonds, generating insurmountable polarisation – not only of opinion, but fundamentally of world-views – and leading to a g...
Posted on 9th Nov 2024
This is a new subsection, set up in November 2024, of my website. It is an open-ended research journal. I felt the need to air some stuff - reflections, repetitions, rants. New stuff made anew, old stuff again and again. To postpone the end of the world. To re-access myself and our networks. And rea...
Posted on 23rd Sep 2024
A short note (September 2024): I started writing this text around June 2024 as I prepared to participate on an event about open source. Since time is not always linear, it took me longer to finish this one than to write a narrower report of the event and my reflections about it. If you read that...
Posted on 8th Sep 2024
From my typewriter series. Berlin, 08.09.24 Material reuse is economic disobedience.
Posted on 8th Sep 2024
From my typewriter series. Berlin, 08.09.24 We are defeated. We are defeated. It is not the quality of our playing. Not the level of our dedication. We do not lose because we are not prepared. We are defeated because the game exists. We lost before we started playing. We lost B...
Posted on 3rd Sep 2024
From my typewriter series. Berlin, 03.09.24. Repair as a material practice. Objects that can no longer not anymore be reinstated to their original, or default, state. No spare parts, no manuals or tools or skills available. Defective by design, designed to fail asa...
Posted on 29th Aug 2024
Berlin, August 2024 Felipe Schmidt Fonseca https://reuse.city | https://efeefe.me The world is full of things. Many of those things were made by humans, using materials sourced ultimately from nature. But such materials won’t always return gracefully to where they came from. The process...
Posted on 12th Aug 2024
Felipe Schmidt Fonseca Berlin, July 2024 Keywords: #generosity #urban #conviviality #reuse #repair #circularity Initial comment After the Viva Voce, the examination board required me to apply modifications to the thesis as a condition to awarding the doctoral degree. I agreed with all th...
Posted on 28th Jul 2024
I was recently in New York City, for two combined events about “open source”. Even typing these words right now makes me quite conscious of how this may sound somehow anachronistic these days. Not that (free and) open source software is not present in virtually everyone's lives in one way or the oth...
Posted on 11th Jun 2024
LLMs offering repair chatbots. I have mixed feelings as big tech enables solutions like these to be created. Of course, it's an old dream of repairers and re-users to have an all-knowing assistant with instant access to a large trove of data. On the other hand, the systems do not account for the sou...