anna andrejew
Practicing Breakdown
On Valuing Fragility, Porosity, and Vulnerability in the City and in Ourselves
Breaking, tearing, unraveling; crumbling, aging, decaying; unfolding, spilling, scattering; ruining, collapsing, and fading ~
My research asks how artistic practice can engage with breakdown — material and emotional, urban and mental — not as failure, but as a condition of life. This perspective can open space for slower, more relational rhythms in how we might inhabit and respond to our surroundings and to ourselves.
My practice sits at the intersection of artistic research, feminist relational thought, practical activism, and urban ecology, exploring how fragility shapes both urban and inner landscapes, including my own. I work in neighborhoods such as Moerwijk and the Schilderswijk in The Hague, where urban systems struggle with neglect and redevelopment, and where vacant plots, cracked pavements, rusting fences, and plants pushing through concrete reveal interruptions in the city’s order. More generally, moments of fatigue, hesitation, or sadness — often considered undesirable or unproductive — arise across society as responses to systemic pressures.
Breakdown is not a privilege: for some, it is an everyday reality; for others, engaging with it becomes an ethical and relational practice. Across contexts, attending to breakdown opens ways of slowing, softening, and attuning to processes of creation-decreation.
Through site-responsive, collective practices — repurposing cardboard from the streets, composting words into new stories, and creating spaces for reflection — I explore how attention, care, and imagination can grow through what falls apart, inviting engagement with porous, regenerative spaces where materials, thoughts, and relationships shift and evolve together.
Continuing this movement of breakdown and renewal, I want to invite publics into spaces of breakdown — both physical and conceptual. These will include breakdown interventions and a publication, How to Breakdown: part fieldbook, part docu-fiction. Together, these initiatives seek to offer ways to live with, and through, what breaks, nurturing relational resilience and alternative rhythms of life.
