Review of Katarzyna Pieprzak, Poetics of Repair: Contemporary Arts and Afterlives of Colonial-Era Mass Housing in the Maghreb. Duke University Press, 2025.

Matthew Brauer
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The central question of Katarzyna Pieprzak’s monograph Poetics of Repair is what art reveals about the built environment and human dwelling in mass housing in Algeria, Morocco, and France. Pieprzak foregrounds art, as distinct from other disciplines more often brought to bear on mass housing, such as architectural history, political science, or sociology. The book assembles a diverse corpus of architecture, sculpture, photography, film, dance, music, poems, theatre, novels, and graphic novels by Tamazghan (North African) and French creators, primarily from the last two decades. These works address mass housing spaces from massive modernist housing blocks to the shantytowns that such developments often replaced. In her analysis, Pieprzak focuses on repair as a capacity proper to art, situating mass housing projects as sites of postcolonial cultural suture and reconstruction.

The book consists of a Preface (which helpfully situates the present work relative to Pieprzak’s previous research on arts, museography, and curation in Morocco), a substantial Introduction, three in-depth body chapters that each focus on mass housing in Casablanca, Algiers, and Paris, respectively, and a Conclusion. Three primary aims and practices emerge as characteristic of Pieprzak’s project across the book. The first is to attend to what happens in art through the full range of the senses. She brings the sonic realm of listening into the basic visual mode of contemplation, becoming receptive to hearing both what appears as well as what does not figure visually. The second aim is to consider both formal and informal arts spheres. While the former remains the primary focus, Pieprzak insistently situates her discussions alongside creative works circulating on popular social media like YouTube. These inclusions make room for the creative and quotidian activities that mass housing residents undertake regularly, without recognition from the art world or political sphere. Finally, Pieprzak attends to the gendered experiences of mass housing as an historically male-dominated architectural practice and a lived space with overlapping, gendered cultural genealogies.

The Introduction conceptualizes the book’s geographic scope, which encompasses mass housing spaces in Morocco, Algeria, and France, through the notion of “transcontinental Maghreb” formulated by Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (2017) to approach the Maghreb as not only a traditional geographic region, but also a space of intertwined routes and residences across the Mediterranean. The Introduction also theorizes repair first from the existing practices of Maghrebi arts, both broadly with regard to cityscapes and then specifically in relation to housing, drawing on wide-ranging works by Amina Menia, Katia Kameli, Hassan Darsi, Kader Attia, Katrin Ströbel, and Florence Renault-Darsi. These perspectives are then complemented by insights from affect theory and, in a provocative, transnational gesture, Martinican thinker Edouard Glissant’s pensée du tremblement, translated as “quakeful thinking.” The resulting concept of poetic repair is capacious and generative, describing arts practices that are future-oriented and integrative, moving from isolation to connectivity, yet not unilinear or unilateral.

Chapter 1, “Sonic Repairs to the Grid: Art Engages the Epistemology of Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca,” considers how visual arts may perform repair with both sound and silence. The point of departure is the visual design technology known as the “modernist grid,” which French architects pioneered in colonial housing projects like SOCICA built in 1940-1942 in the Hay Mohammadi neighborhood of Casablanca. Yto Barrada’s 2013 photography of housing blocks in the neighborhood “moves us from modernist buildings on the grid to the spaces in between—to streets, apartment interiors, and alleyways” (29). Pieprzak attends to these spaces outside the lines of modernism sonically, listening for voices and sounds that would resound there. She thus rethinks the seeming human emptiness of Barrada’s photographs, which concentrate on the forms produced by the interactions of the alternating low-rise and high-rise buildings with vegetation, terrain, and urban infrastructures. The other works the author examines in the chapter suggestively echo in the soundscapes traced by Barrada’s images: from the popular music of Nass Al Ghiwane and Lemchaheb to the songs of soccer club supporters (Sonia Terrab’s 2020 documentary film L7asla), individual piano practice (Lahcen Zinoun’s 2002 short film Le Piano and Fouad Souiba’s 2012 novel L’incompris de Hay Mohammadi), amateur and professional music videos, and Youtube “driving videos” of the neighborhood filmed from moving cars. Across forms, genres, and generations, mass housing offers different affordances to artistic expression, whether individual or collective, formal or informal.    

Chapter 2, “Affecting Relation in Climat de France, Algiers: Decolonial Poetics and Embodied Ethics of Recognition,” considers the architectural history and lived experiences of housing projects in Algeria and France, many of which were built by the same designers. Pieprzak interprets the reparative possibilities of Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation. She treats the open, connective, and diversifying relays of relation as part of “a reparative process that dynamically transforms colonial history through new definitions and possibilities of kinship” that are “affective and embodied” (71). Following the book’s transcontinental methodology, the chapter opens with French writer Marie Richeux’s 2017 novel Climats de France, whose protagonist discovers that the architect of the housing project where she grew up in France also designed the massive Climat de France development, built for Algerian residents in the midst of the country’s war for independence. The relational spiral followed by Richeux’s novel reaches a limit as it turns back onto its protagonist’s individuality and protestations of innocence with regard to French colonial history in Algeria.

The chapter picks up the relay with other artists and works. Amina Menia’s 2012 video piece Un album de famille bien particulier also works on the history of Climat de France through archival material, but steps into and speaks out of the gaps in that record. Menia’s voiceover narration, Pierzak argues, works reparatively in those gaps by experimenting with the distinct national narratives of warring adversaries as familial relations, changing their register and their social configurations to produce differently-gendered histories. A similar reappropriation of the power of representation figures, albeit in an exclusively male lineage, in the films and photography Climat de France from 2011 to 2013 by French artist Stéphane Couturier and the 2015 images of his Algerian collaborator and neighborhood resident, Abdelhamid Rachiche.

Chapter 3, “Remembering and Repairing Women’s Homes: Nanterre, Bidonville de la Folie,” thematizes the gender dynamics that appeared in the first two chapters by focusing on women’s space in the La Folie shantytown, which housed thousands of Algerians and Moroccans in Nanterre, just outside of Paris. Pieprzak reflects on the roles of mediation and materiality in shaping and transmitting the doubly-marginalized experience of women residents, in their daily lives and in the violent repression of the October 17, 1961 march for Algerian independence.

The 1960s photographs of French activist and social worker Monique Hervo, who resided in La Folie from 1959 until its destruction in 1971, are invaluable mediators for the memory work about life in La Folie and about October 17, 1961, as in Laurent Maffre’s graphic novel Demain, demain (2012). These photographs and other interviews with former residents inform Maffre’s drawings that etch the material-built environment of La Folie. Mediation, in the guise of a fictional documentary, is also central to memory in Leïla Sebbar’s novel La Seine était rouge (1999). These mediations could also be taken to describe Pieprzak’s method of attending to art’s poetics of repair in the history of mass housing. As she puts it, “the process to repair memory is one of talking and listening or bringing people and stories back into ‘pairings’ even if such acts need to be indirect and mediated” (127). Concluding with Mehdi Lallaoui’s 2014 play Monique H., Nanterre 1961 and the performances by the 1970s Nanterre theatre troupe La Kahina, Pieprzak suggests that the stage may recast mediation as repertoire, emphasizing co-presence and participation in the production and transmission of knowledge.

The Conclusion revisits the distinction between poetic repair and material or monetary reparations, as well as between the dynamics of the international art world and the everyday creative, reparative work already undertaken by mass housing residents. Pieprzak carefully highlights art’s production of “affective instances of incipience, or epistemic moments of potential departure toward something that may or may not be transformative,” affirming the value of “an intense moment of sudden possibility” that cannot be measured in the scales of the very systems it is attempting to transcend (170).

Poetics of Repair is a beautifully written book that is amply illustrated with images from the works it discusses. Its integrative treatment of arts from different regions and creative spheres is productive of moving, attentive close readings, but also generative of questions, many of which go beyond the book’s stated scope. For instance, the pairings of international and local, professional and amateur artists around the subject of mass housing raises questions about class and social structure, as expressed in the art world and in mass housing spaces.

Likewise, while Pieprzak does not address the Tamazgha studies, repair is a promising concept for this field, which opens another line of questioning with regard to her book. How do the afterlives of mass housing speak to the cultural geography of Tamazgha, as well as the Maghreb? What of Amazigh language, arts, and artists? What voices have not yet been heard in the stories of mass housing? The existing sociological literature on rural-urban migration from both Amazigh and Arabic speaking communities would no doubt benefit from this artistic lens, too.

Finally, Pieprzak’s caring and attentive reception to the poetics of repair in practices already underway in marginalized communities, before and beyond the interventions of the art world, also hold promise for Tamazgha studies scholarship.