The Society for Care and Maintenance approaches care as a practiced, embodied, and conflicted act. It unfolds in the margins of legitimacy, where proximity to brokenness shapes how care is performed.

The work began as a daily ritual of collecting shattered tempered glass from city streets after damage. Rather than treating these sites as spectacle or crisis, the project tends to what remains: fragments that we must tend.

​

Through acts of sorting, mapping, transferring, embedding, and restraint, SCAM reframes care as a form of labor that is both calming and controlling, visible yet unacknowledged. The materials are not repaired or redeemed; they are held in suspension, positioned in ways that register touch, pressure, and time. 

​

SCAM first collected glass from the downtown-adjacent neighborhoods of Oakland in the summer of 2022. Then, a daily ritual of tending to streets where car break-ins occurred, SCAM donned a collection kit comprising a rubber brush and gloves, a small metal bin, and non-descript plastic bags. Notions of caregiving, ritual, and time recontextualize the binary of ‘victim’ and ‘aggressor’ towards the systems that obscure their acts of division. ​​