(Ir)reparability Begins in the Body: Towards a Museum of Disrepair

Abstract

This chapter is based on a workshop we conducted with PhD candidatesattending the Summer SchoolRestitution, Reparations, Reparation–Toward aNew Global Society?held at Villa Vigoni, Italy. It offers reflections on the situatedand embodied experience of talking, thinking, and conceptualising repair andheritage.Starting from the work of the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, we en-visaged the possibility of a“Museum of Disrepair”and invited PhD students toanalyse the impacts of such a potential site. Attia’s idea of“irreparability”was atthe centre of our investigation, and we thought about the notion of“repair”inrelation to the racialised body, wounded by histories of colonialism and white-ness. As the analysis shows, repairing damages does not mean to erase the physi-cal evidence of the injury, hoping for the disappearance of the violence. Rather, itis essential to acknowledge pain and damage, and to link the injury with its visi-ble scarification. Restitution, as we argue, is only an element of a wider discourseon reconciliation, decolonisation, and infrastructural changes to Europe’s narra-tive of world.