BASICS

Author(s)
Edited by Kader Attia, Maria Hlavajova, and Wietske Maas

Fragments of Repair (forthcoming March 2025) is the fourth publication in BAK’s publishing series BASICS which revisits fundamental questions and urgencies of our time—the “basics”—and seeks to develop afresh the building blocks of lexicons, tactics, scenarios, and relations that enable action in contemporary conditions.

Today’s entwined crises—from ecological catastrophe to the climate of permanent warfare—reveal deep-seated wounds that issue from historical colonialisms and present-day authoritarianisms, economic disparity and growing racial violence, and the abuses inflicted on vulnerable populations and the planet. To address this disquieting chaos, Fragments of Repair, co-conceptualized by artist and curator Kader Attia with curators and researchers Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, offers a collection of long- and short-form essays, visual essays, and conversations on decolonial repair as both a tool and a tactic of engagement with the current state of the world.

The book, which includes major voices such as that of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Françoise Vergès, develops Attia’s ongoing inquiry into the possibility of enacting “repair” in the acute context of brokenness, which brings chronic uncertainty, social isolation, exhaustion, loss, and fear into sharper relief. What pathways could repair, rather than return to, past ways? How can we develop collective tools for emancipation and resistance? And, in the face of what is irreparable, how can we meaningfully address wounds and scars, which are deeply tied to European modernity?

Fragments of Repair
Edited by Kader Attia, Maria Hlavajova, and Wietske Maas
Pub date March 2025
Published by BAK, basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht and Jap Sam Books, Prinsenbeek
ISBN: 978-94-93329-31-7
256 pp., 5 x 9 in, 50 figures

Contributors: Norman Ajari, Kader Attia, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Maria Hlavajova, Wietske Maas, Catherine Malabou, Olivier Marboeuf, Achille Mbembe, Wayne Modest, Omedi Ochieng, Matteo Pasquinelli, Rachael Rakes, David Scott, Rolando Vázquez, Françoise Vergès, Elena Vogman, and Eyal Weizman