Poetics of Repair

Contemporary Arts and Afterlives of Colonial-Era Mass Housing in the Maghreb

Paperback | 31 January 2025

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Today, most colonial-era modernist mass housing is seen as fundamentally broken: crumbling concrete spaces of social alienation and containment that fractured societies both then and now. In Poetics of Repair, Katarzyna Pieprzak examines how contemporary visual, literary, and performance art of the Maghreb has the potential to change the terms, histories, and imagined futures of mass housing in North Africa and France. Pieprzak dives deeply into contemporary art engagements with three mass housing sites that epitomize the French colonial geography of modernist architecture in the Maghreb. She identifies in this art what she names a transformative "poetics of repair": a practice that enjoins, puts in relation, or simply brings closer together broken materials, separated people, and severed timelines. Reading art and its engagements with mass housing, Pieprzak argues, has the potential to unmoor established knowledge and rehearse the tensions and productive ambiguities inherent to practices of constitution and revision. She demonstrates that such a reading practice is a step toward a reparative epistemology for mass housing that turns sites of wreckage and alienation into sites of possible solidarities and new formulations of history and experience.

Industry Reviews

"Poetics of Repair is a meticulously written, carefully nuanced analysis of the afterlives of colonialism as manifest in mass housing projects across an expanded Magrebi context that includes urban space on both sides of the Mediterranean. Katarzyna Pieprzak reads artworks in a staggering array of media to give us a beautiful image of the ways in which art names and performs reparations that allow us to reimagine spaces otherwise all too often considered lost to squalor and despair." -- Hannah Feldman, Katherine Stein Sachs CW'69 and Keith L. Sachs W'67 Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania

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