Inside a small enclosure beside Mattancherry’s Anand Warehouse, repaired objects sit stoically, like relics from another time. Chairs, tools, appliances, musical instruments, and household items bear the visible marks of wear and use. Objects that once lay broken, set aside with the intention of being fixed someday.
At the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, these everyday belongings now form History (Version Mattancherry), a participatory art project that turns repair into both process and proposition.
It invites residents of Kochi to bring in damaged objects for repair. Once restored — fully or partially — by local craftspeople and technicians, these objects are placed together in this temporary space called ‘House of Repair’, forming an evolving archive of the city’s domestic material life.
Each item is labelled with the name of the person who repaired it and, when the Biennale ends, returned to its owner. Thus completing a cycle that begins and ends outside the exhibition context.
The project is conceived by Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle, based in Sao Paulo. During her time in Kochi, she began noticing a recurring pattern.
“I came across a very particular scene: damaged objects accumulating in the streets, left behind yet still full of use, memory, and a sense of future possibility,” she says.
These objects, discarded but not abandoned, became the catalyst for revisiting a work first realised in 2004. Unlike the first version, which Marcelle produced alone, the Biennale-supported structure mediates exchanges between common people, technicians and the production team.
Situated on Bazaar Road, ‘House of Repair’ dissolves the boundary between exhibition space and everyday life. Crucially, none of the objects remains in the gallery permanently. “Their presence in the space at Mattancherry is intentionally temporary,” Cinthia says, challenging the idea “that an artwork must be permanently fixed, owned, or absorbed into a collection in order to be legitimised as art”.
This refusal of permanence reshapes what the work itself becomes. “In this sense, the artwork is not the object itself, but the network of relationships, gestures of care, and exchanges of trust that momentarily unfold within the institutional space,” says Cinthia.
At its core, the project raises a fundamental question: how can an ordinary object be transformed into an artwork without ever becoming part of an art collection?
Cinthia describes it as a “propositional project — a work that deals directly with relationships between people and things”.
Artistic value, she suggests, does not arise from acquisition or market inscription, but from the relational process between those who lend the objects, those who repair them, and those who encounter them during the exhibition.
Described by Cinthia as a “counter-museum”, the project also confronts the extractive logic of cultural institutions. “Historically, museums have functioned as sites of accumulation, often entangled with colonial violence and the seizure of objects from their social worlds,” she adds.
By ensuring that all objects return to everyday life, the project stages what she calls a refusal of capture: “Nothing is owned, nothing is archived, nothing is stabilised.”
The objects themselves carry varied stories. Some are emotionally charged, kept because of memory or attachment. “Most of the accounts revolved around acts of memory retrieval,” Cinthia notes, adding that the objects also function “as a kind of portrait of people with whom one shares an affective bond.”
Visitors can participate through the ‘House of Repair’ by bringing in items that are simple or affordable to fix, including umbrellas, wristwatches, toys, chairs, tools, appliances, books, and ceramics.
Organisers remind that the focus is on functional repair rather than restoration to perfection, working within realistic limits of skill, material and time. Not everything can be fixed, and the project does not promise transformation.
In History (Version Mattancherry), repair becomes a way of thinking about history itself — not as something sealed in the past, but as something lived with, worked on and carried forward.