Poetics of Repair

Katarzyna Pieprzak

Poetics of Repair
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Duke University Press
Country
United States
Published
28 January 2025
Pages
232
ISBN
9781478031284

Poetics of Repair

Katarzyna Pieprzak

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 conjoins, 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.

Order online and we’ll ship when available (28 January 2025)

Our stock data is updated periodically, and availability may change throughout the day for in-demand items. Please call the relevant shop for the most current stock information. Prices are subject to change without notice.

Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to a wishlist.