Poetics of Repair

“Poetics of Repair is a meticulously written, carefully nuanced analysis of the afterlives of colonialism as manifest in mass housing projects across an expanded Maghrebi 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, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania

“Poetics of Repair is an amazing, entirely original work of bricolage (in the most laudatory sense) in which Katarzyna Pieprzak combines museology, art history, ethnography, literary criticism, and poetry. She teaches us to critically analyze the culture, typologies, and trans-Mediterranean genealogies of mass housing through the many interventions of contemporary artists. I can’t think of another book like it.” - Susan Slyomovics, author of Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage

"Poetics of Repair provides a useful and timely corrective to two once-dominant points of view. Readers are reminded to make efforts to perceive how buildings are experienced rather than focus exclusively on architects’ intentions. Pieprzak also challenges her readers to rethink Frantz Fanon’s claim that colonial mass housing forced the colonized to live in a “zone of non-being”. . . . Artists who address mass housing inherited from the French are saying “yes” to the “no” of impersonal and alienating apartment blocks." - Diana Wylie, H-Africa

"Poetics of Repair is a timely and engaging exploration of various forms of contemporary art in the context of colonial-era mass housing." - Christopher R. Hebert, Postcolonial Studies

"This book is a highly valuable contribution to art historical work in the Maghreb, and will be useful to architectural historians, urban sociologists, and all those who have an interest in mass housing, and, more amply, urbanism in the Maghreb." - Youssef Boucetta, Journal of North African Studies