Publication: REPAIR Fanzine No. 2

We are very happy to announce the publication of our REPAIR fanzine no. 2! You can download it here. The second issue explores the history of maintenance and repair of the Luxembourg telephone network.

The fanzine is based on interviews, archival research, hands-on experience, fieldwork and more. Anaïs Bloch contributed to the research and was responsible for the design. Anaïs has extensive experience in producing fanzines, having previously produced a series of fanzines on mobile phone repair shops in Switzerland. Although a fanzine typically refers to a non-professional, non-official publication, Anaïs’ work offers a more academic perspective. Yet with a mix of fieldwork and brief impressions, she maintains the ideal of the fanzine as a rapidly produced research output. With a combination of pictures, illustrations and textual elements, the final product reaches out to a broader audience interested in repair at large.

To connect Anaïs’ talent and our research as historians of technology, we decided to base this second volume on Rebeccas’ project about a long-term perspective on the Luxembourg telecommunication network. The focus here continues to be on the transformative and adaptive forces that repair and maintenance as practices have on a large technical system in a nearly 100-year perspective.

Anaïs and Rebecca, therefore, began their research together in the archive rooms housed in a former switching centre in Wasserbillig. Among the many boxes, artefacts and dusty files, they were able to enlist a chief engineer formerly working at POST as a guide.

The result is a multi-layered perspective based on visual reappraisal, interviews, historical material and an artistic approach.