Lisa Wells operates through the long-term project The Fix, a practice that investigates how art can renegotiate relationships between bodies, institutions, and infrastructures. Rather than offering quick solutions, The Fix treats repair as a slow, iterative process that exposes fault lines in healthcare, labor, and community care. This profile explains the program’s core premises, traces its methodological commitments, and contextualizes how Wells positions aesthetics within civic repair.
Background and Program Orientation
Since its launch, The Fix has been understood as an evolving framework that links choreography, institutional critique, and mutual aid. Lisa Wells positions the project at the intersection of care work, disability justice, and cultural production, treating each engagement as a site where repair is both symbolic and practical. Across residencies, workshops, and long-term collaborations, the initiative foregrounds community-defined needs while remaining attentive to aesthetic form and critique.
Methodology and Process
The Fix treats process as a public artifact, documenting missteps alongside breakthroughs to make visible the conditions that enable repair. Workshops, listening sessions, and iterative performances are framed not as polished interventions but as shared experiments. By foregrounding facilitation guides, participant feedback, and ongoing documentation, Wells creates a corpus of work that resolves fixed narratives in favor of adaptable protocols.
Key Themes and Focus Areas
- Care infrastructures and their limits under market and state pressures
- Body autonomy, access, and the politics of support
- Labor, precarity, and the valuation of emotional and physical care
- Collaborative repair across disciplines and communities
The Fix in Practice: Events and Outputs
While The Fix is structured as a long-term program, specific events and outputs have helped crystallize its concerns. From community listening sessions to staged performance protocols, each iteration refines the language of repair. The following table summarizes verified attributes of the project’s structure and aims, providing a concise reference for its orientation.
| Attribute | Verified Detail | Source Type |
|---|---|---|
| Program frame | Long-term project and ongoing platform | Public program descriptions |
| Primary aims | Investigate repair through artistic practice and community care | Artist statements and curatorial notes |
| Scope | Hybrid: workshops, performances, facilitation, documentation | Published schedules and process notes |
| Guiding themes | Care infrastructures, access, labor, and collaborative repair | Thematic outlines and public dialogues |
Theoretical and Political Context
The Fix explicitly aligns with traditions of care ethics, disability justice, and mutual aid, in which repair is understood as a collective rather than individual responsibility. By drawing on disability studies, queer theory, and labor organizing, Wells reframes artistic production as a mode of civic infrastructure. This theoretical grounding ensures that aesthetic decisions remain tethered to questions of access, consent, and shared vulnerability.
Critical Perspectives
Critics and participants note that The Fix demands sustained engagement, resisting quick consumption. Its reliance on dialogue and incremental change can feel slow in a cultural landscape oriented toward rapid resolution. Yet this extended timeframe is central to its ethic of repair, which prioritizes durable relationships over viral moments.
Community Partnerships and Institutional Context
The Fix frequently collaborates with grassroots organizations, mutual aid networks, and community care practitioners. These partnerships ensure that the project remains responsive to local needs rather than imposing external solutions. By positioning artists as facilitators and co-learners, Wells creates conditions in which institutional shortcomings are revealed and collectively addressed.
Forms of Collaboration
- Community listening sessions that shape project directions
- Residencies with organizations working at the intersection of care and advocacy
- Public dialogues that pair artists, caregivers, and organizers
- Documentation and archiving intended to support ongoing initiatives
Impact and Legacy Considerations
Because The Fix is structured as a long-term program, its impact is measured in shifts in discourse, strengthened community practices, and evolving artistic vocabularies around repair. Rather than producing discrete artworks meant for institutional consumption, the project aims to leave behind adaptable tools and relationships. For audiences familiar with the language of social practice, The Fix can be read as part of a broader lineage of art that treats care as both medium and prerequisite.
Key Questions for Further Engagement
- How do participating communities define the goals of repair in their own terms?
- Which practices from The Fix are portable to other institutional contexts?
- How do funding structures shape the possibilities and limits of long-term repair work?
- In what ways does aesthetic form support or hinder the aims of mutual care?