Handmade relief models as matters of concern: Maintaining, restoring, and repairing mountains?

Through a case study of what are known as ‘relief models’—for example of areas of landscapes—this article approaches representational objects in and as practice. Such an approach implies following the multiplicity of practices that are gathered in representational objects to bring them into and maintain their existence, especially those that often remain unacknowledged by analytical attention. Most discussions of representational objects focus on their representational capacities and properties, paying less attention to the activities that ensure their ontological security as objects. Those activities concern not only the manufacture of representational objects, but also their maintenance—which is placed at the heart of this discussion. The maintenance of relief models manifests itself as a semiotic-material ecology. Entangled here are the ontological tact of the craftsperson, the affordances, resistances, and responsiveness of the materials, and the meaning-makings and stories that articulate and guide maintenance and repair. The practice of maintaining such objects, however, diverges from their production. Their production essentially accommodates metric distance since representation involves transporting a ‘thing’ through chains of reference. On the contrary, their maintenance aims to accommodate multiple temporalities. This involves not only the ways of being in time that are specific to each material that composes the object but also the idealized past of an unused object, its worn present, and its anticipated (repaired) future. By playing with the double meaning of the word ‘representing’, this article speculatively questions the extent to which practices of maintenance of, and care for, representational objects can inform a re-vision and rethinking of the relationships to what they are meant to re-present —that is, to what counts as nature.