Abstract from the publisher: This chapter is based on a workshop we conducted with PhD candidates attending the Summer School Restitution, 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 envisaged the possibility of a “Museum of Disrepair”and invited PhD students to analyse the impacts of such a potential site. Attia’s idea of “irreparability”was at the centre of our investigation, and we thought about the notion of “repair” in relation to the racialised body, wounded by histories of colonialism and whiteness. As the analysis shows, repairing damages does not mean to erase the physical evidence of the injury, hoping for the disappearance of the violence. Rather, it is essential to acknowledge pain and damage, and to link the injury with its visible scarification. Restitution, as we argue, is only an element of a wider discourseon reconciliation, decolonisation, and infrastructural changes to Europe’s narrative of world.1
Keywords: Kader Attia, critical heritage, decoloniality, embodiment, irreparabil-ity, museums, repair, reparations
1 The authors would like to thank the editors of this volume as well as Markus Messling and Christiane Solte-Gresser for the invitation to partake in the event and the subsequent publication.Jonas Tinius was supported as postdoctoral researcher of the project Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism, which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation pro-gramme (Grant agreement No. 819931). Excerpts of this chapter have previously appeared in theItalian monthly Art e Dossier (see Tinius 2021b).