Colonial Modern, ed. by Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali, Marion von Osten

In post-war modernism, architecture and urban designs had a high symbolic value. They not only stood for the aesthetic project of modernism, but also for social modernity and the dawn of a new society, whose feasibility and plannability they literally represented. However, this symbolic function of housing estate architecture was embedded in a field of conflict. The architecture of the 1950s and 1960s incorporated population policy strategies that had been tested in the colonial context. On the other hand, the architects attempted to incorporate the experience of decolonization into their plans. They did this by synthesizing the ways of life of the people in the North African colonies, which were apostrophized as “pre-modern”, with the project of modernity to create a new, different modernity.

The volume takes these lines of flight as its starting point.The focus is on the relationship between the aesthetic regime of modernity on the one hand and the project of modernization on the other.Especially in the context of colonialism, the tense entanglement of both levels is clearly evident.The exhibition on which this volume is based, “In the Desert of Modernity.Colonial Planning and After”, on which this volume is based, has traced these intertwined histories of modern architecture and European urban planning in colonial North Africa and thus the ambivalences between colonial rule and the utopias of modernity.On this basis, the publication not only reflects the current state of contemporary research, but also initiates a new, transdisciplinary (and international) debate on the understanding of modernism (and thus also postmodernism) outside of architectural debates with the thesis of “negotiated modernism”.
With contributions by
Mogniss H.Abdallah/Agence IM'media, Nezar AlSayyad, Kahina Amal Djiar, Kader Attia, Tom Avermaete, Madeleine Bernstorff, Mark Crinson, Hassan Darsi, Monique Eleb, Serhat Karakayali, Christian Kravagna, Brigitta Kuster, Labor k3000, André Loeckx, Kobena Mercer, Valentin Mudimbe, Françoise Navez-Bouchanine, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Marion von Osten, Bernd M.Scherer, Horia Serhane, Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Daniel Weiss