Thoughts on Repair and Remediation

Critical Curating

Oct 10

Remediation is not nostalgia, nor is it a utopian projection. It is work performed and actualized, always oriented toward the present and the possible futures that emerge from it.

Daniela Zyman • 10/10/25

Critical Curating is The Curatorial’s section devoted to more theoretically oriented considerations of curatorial research and practice. While of a specialized nature, we seek essays for this section that are written for a broadly engaged intellectual audience interested in curating’s philosophical, historical, aesthetic, political, and social tenets, as well as a labor-based activity and its ramifications.
In “Thoughts on Repair and Remediation,” Daniela Zyman examines the possibilities and limitations of repair as both a concept and a practice, drawing from her curatorial work with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) at C3A, the Andalusian cultural institution in Córdoba. Anchored in a trilogy of exhibitions—Abundant Futures, Remedios, and The Ecologies of Peace—the essay reframes remediation not as a return to a prior state, but as an ongoing, situated engagement with brokenness, violence, and loss. Engaging with Indigenous cosmologies, Black radical thought, and postcolonial critique, Zyman approaches repair as a collective, relational, and necessarily unfinished process. Rejecting redemptive narratives, she argues for a politics and “poethics” that remain with the trouble, embracing the ambivalence and irresolution inherent in reparative work. She further situates contemporary remedial praxis within planetary struggles for habitability in the ruins of extractive capitalism and settler modernity.
The essay originally appeared in Spanish in Remedios / Ecologías De La Paz, edited by Alex Martin Rod and Zyman (Madrid: Turner Ediciones, S.A, TBA21, 2025).

In 2022, TBA21 was invited to develop an exhibition trilogy at the C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, marking a three-year institutional residency in Córdoba. This collaboration sought to situate and contextualize visionary artistic practices from the TBA21 collection within the context of its longstanding engagement with ecological and social concerns. The three annual exhibitions in TBA21’s cycle that I curated at C3A—conceived around the concepts of abundance (Abundant Futures), repair (Remedios), and just and peaceful futures (The Ecologies of Peace)—experimented with artistic expressions and aesthetic methodologies dedicated to the collective struggle of forging a livable imaginary for the future. They were not only curatorial articulations but also propositions for how to endure and create under conditions of crisis. As the anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli reminds us—drawing on the wisdom of her Aboriginal family in Australia—this requires what she calls a “science of dwelling.”1

Such a science refuses to treat catastrophe as an external condition, instead transforming loss and grief into meaningful actions and aesthetically resonant creations through which individuals shape more-than-human and storied realities. It insists that enthusiasm for worldmaking must not be abandoned in the face of deprivation and dispossession. And rather than being paralyzed by the desire to restore a previous condition, this science cultivates relational ways of being and thriving under the (failing, hostile, and sad) conditions that humans must contend with, passing down the ingenuity and wisdom for their rehabilitation to future generations.

Consequently, the science of dwelling in economies of abandonment doesn’t imply acceptance of the status quo, or some sort of gratitude for the (limiting and always limited) possibilities that remain. This science is not misguided by the artistic and scientific canons that no longer extend comfortably to the contemporary situation. Instead, it urges us to consider new ideas and models for a different geology, an epoch that demands that we experiment with our cosmologies, concepts, stories, and with everything broken and damaged. It unleashes creativity through encounters and draws very near the objects we study, relate to, or wonder about—a closeness that can be described as intimacy or situatedness, or simply as being touched. This closeness is fundamental for building relationships based on relational accountability, steering us away from extractive economies and reductive ways of knowing, which dictate and limit the shape of our world.

We also draw inspiration from the many transformative movements, initiatives, and engagements that have emerged over the last few decades, including—but not limited to—those centered around buen vivir, radical agri-ecologies, the reinvigoration of the commons, economic degrowth, care networks, abolitionism, peace activism, and the Black, Brown, Indigenous, and youth movements marching in the streets to demand an earth uprising. This inspiration also extends to the many artists, researchers, and curators who have mined and recomposed the archives and counter-archives of abundance, repair, and justice.

Reparative Politics under the Climates of Capital

In everyday language, the term “remediation” can encompass meanings like “remedy,” “repair,” “fix,” “renovate,” “restore,” or even “return.” It can also extend to practices of healing, reparation, and restitution. However, these broad interpretations can lead to confusion unless we clarify where our emphasis lies. Each synonym offers distinct insights but also has its limitations. To navigate this complexity, let’s begin by exploring the concept of Remedios as a form of reparative politics. The first lesson, as I see it, is this: the creative ethics of repair are neither an individualistic pursuit of self-improvement nor a narrow, single-issue concern. Rather, it encompasses a range of social, material, and symbolic practices that address multiple, intersecting breakages or crises.

Indeed, the call for reparative politics runs deep in a time marked by numerous crises and the call for atonement and re-memorialization of past injustices. If the spirit of revolution defined the generation of the 1960s and beyond, today’s political engagements tend toward reparation, healing, and reconciliation. The most radical visions and corrective actions converge on addressing the damage to the environment, defending a different concept of the human and the health and well-being of earthly life, while redressing the aftermath of colonialism and its genocidal and epistemocidal impulses. Guided by the understanding that the social, political, environmental, and epistemic crises (understood as a turning point, per the word’s Greek etymology) are interrelated, with their effects compounding, thinkers, artists, and activists often rally under a trans-environmentalist banner, which to political thinker Nancy Fraser includes both “‘environmental’ and ‘non-environmental’” facets of the crisis.2

The “climates of capital,” as Fraser calls the confluence of ills and afflictions bestowed on the world through global capital, are as disruptive and pervasive as the weather. Rather than unifying “the world” through more mobility, exchange, and commercial integration, globalization’s forbidding paradox has been the production of more discord, fragmentation, and injustice. The primary motivation that has driven the neoliberal world order has been “the reallocation of the Earth's resources and their privatization by those who had the greatest military might and the largest technological advantages,” according to the Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembe.3 The machinations of primitive accumulation have not only accelerated inequality among nations and inflicted an unparalleled environmental catastrophe on the biosphere but also escalated a supremacist and deeply racist anti-humanism, premised on the notion that the world belongs to a few exceptional groups.

The exclusion of racialized, poor, differently abled, and otherwise stigmatized groups— “human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable or superfluous”—from the world in common is driven by a white, supremacist “politics of belonging” on the rise since the 1990s.4 These politics of belonging are triggered by an identitarian conception of selfhood and “defensive identity,”5 rooted in the complete disregard and lack of empathy for the rights, lives, and well-being of those deemed outside the boundaries that differentiate and often physically separate those who belong from those who do not.6 Such forces and powers invest in building walls and borders to police the movement and determine the rights of those who must be excluded. And they celebrate the individual (and by extension propertied relations) as the model of the human, whose self-aggrandizing entitlement to freedom, sovereignty, possession, aggressive self-expression, self-defense, etc., undermines social obligation, solidarity, and sociality.

It is precisely the divisionary impetus of both globalism and identitarian politics that we must resist through reparative ethics. Even in light of the different agendas of environmentalist movements, Indigenous struggles, social mobilization, and anti-capitalist activists, among others, it is only, as Fraser aptly demonstrates, a unified politics that links ecological concerns with social justice movements that can lead to the transformation of the economic, political, and epistemic systems that underpin it. This means building alliances between environmentalists, labor movements, and social justice advocates to create more equitable and sustainable futures.

No Quick Fix

Perhaps the most contested interpretation of Remedios is the act of fixing something broken—broken earth, broken bodies, objects, ideas, infrastructures, or even a broken world. Given the current dismal state of affairs, the act of fixing would seem like a noble pursuit. But what if, as the unfolding climate catastrophe lays bare, there are things that are irreparable or broken beyond repair? What if that which we try to mend and plaster over are merely the symptoms or small structural parts of much larger infrastructures of brokenness? Black, Brown, and queer theorists and writers, whose “lives are lived under occupation,” have been developing a rich body of thinking on repair, heedful of the material and immaterial injustices of colonial violence that persist into the present.7

The Black poet and writer Fred Moten, who has much to offer for understanding the genocidal structures of slavery and how they are currently active in racial capitalism, argues that the scars and losses from these violations are neither reducible nor fixable. He states: “To imagine that our stories of loss are also stories of war is also to imagine that there will be no repair, that this is something we’ll never get over, and that this not getting over it, which will have always been part inability and part refusal, bears so much more than the limited possibilities that repair implies.”8

Moten challenges us to consider the im/possibility of repair, suggesting that enduring wounds and losses may not be something to “fix,” but rather stories of war to share and reckon with. He does not explicitly write, though that’s what I understand, that these acts of sharing—through writing, reading, storytelling, and art-making—must refuse more harm or injury in the name of reparation.9 Given that the urge for repair is potentially reactionary and sometimes extractive, certainly damage-centered and quite often reductionist, only the “practice [of] vigilance, militance, and love, which (the abolition of) war demands” would lay the groundwork for a future where racism— understood as the systemic vulnerability to premature death—is no longer tolerated as the foundation of our existence.

Similarly, for the French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, the traumas of history’s darkest moments have left enduring material and immaterial scars, much like a phantom limb from an amputated body part.10 In his art, Attia attends to the work of repair by exposing the brokenness of things and holding their shards in place with visible staples. Metal clips and clamps serve as both evidence of the endured violence and a starting point for the ongoing and often denied process of healing. To Attia, “fixing” means “to hold in place,” allowing the fractures and amputations to continuously unmoor the beholders, with his art persistently asking more questions, or as poet Ross Gay puts it, “unfixing” us—that is, unsettling and unworlding us.

As we are bound to live with the consequences of irreparability, recognizing that repair always already arises amid a rolling catastrophe, and acknowledging that something ongoing cannot be memorialized, we have to concede that any form of collective ameliorative efforts and remediation would have to summon their energies from the residues, wounds, and debris left behind—from the underside of history. The conditions of brokenness are only bearable if they are seen not through the hope for benevolent acts of repair, but through the intimate and intricate relationships inherent in the science of dwelling, which, as discussed, is both an analytics and a worldview in action, responding to the unfolding politics of abandonment. It is in the terraformed and depleted soil where seeds are planted and new growth is nurtured. Working with broken tools, inadequate and rigged, is unsettling, humbling, and sobering. It puts us to the task of cobbling things together, improvising with what we have, while grieving losses and tending to wounds. On a geologically and biologically destabilized planet, this entails acknowledging and listening to the vexed forces that have been silenced and are now revendicated in their presence.

With this sobering realization comes another difficult junction in the face of vulnerability. Given the current conditions of life, where no spaces are untouched by conflict, residual traces of dispossession, or the stench of environmental degradation, reparative work cannot withdraw into safe spaces. Safe spaces are bordered and defensive, often built on one-dimensional notions of identity, subjectivity, and entitlement. While striving for solidarity, mutual support, and communal bonding is imperative, immunity (which has its root in the term munus, the public duty or service offered to the communis) has exclusionary effects due to its overemphasis on security and defense mechanisms. The same holds true for art institutions. If art spaces pretend to offer zones of comfort and embrace an exclusive and at times elitist politics of intimacy that serve as antidotes to otherwise complex and painful realities, they risk replicating a logic of enclosure. Under the contemporary regime of bordering, cultural spaces that prioritize protection and immunity often end up reinforcing divisions, excluding those considered insufficiently radical.

The Political in Our Time Must Start from the Imperative to Reconstruct the World in Common11

If repair (as the act of fixing) is im/possible, beyond our best intentions, can we nevertheless aspire to “reconstruct the world in common”? This concept of reconstruction is not about creating something new, but rather about interrupting the cycles of destruction and undoing that characterize modern life and the kinds of pro-capital counter-reforms of extractivism and structural adjustments. Mbembe considers reparation and restitution as the only viable politics for creating conditions under which individuals and their world can sustain their presence. Despite the difficulties of repair and its potential failure, Mbembe focuses on ways to restore relationships and livability, allowing for the renewal of shared experiences and alliances in a world that is caught up in the contradictions, injustices, and structures that we have already identified as violent, damaged, and intolerable. He is remarkably emphatic when he states: “The key question today is how (life and the world in common) can be repaired, reproduced, sustained and cared for, made durable, preserved and universally shared, and under what conditions it ends.”12

In the epilogue to his influential book Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe identifies the life-sustaining “endless labor of reparation”13 within African cosmologies and vernacular knowledge, whose function was to negotiate and consolidate the relationship between humans and the earth beings with whom they share the world.14 Initiated experts (akin to Amazonian shamans or magicians in other cultures) were and are, in a sense, “reality therapists,” whose labor is to harmonize the effects of transformation with processes of regeneration. As long as the curative work on the cosmological system is performed, life stabilizes in an “imperishable form” that strives toward reproduction and multiplication. “Sharing the world with other beings was the ultimate debt,” Mbembe concludes.15

It is neither nostalgia nor traditionalism that motivates Mbembe. Like Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and other thinkers, he insists that the therapeutic interventions needed today must deeply engage with the erasures and the cannibalistic structures passed down from modernity. Under the ominous climate regime of the Anthropocene and amid the ruins of racial capitalism—potentially even hurtling “toward the End of the World as we know it”—reparation must address the catastrophic impacts of systemic, historical, and ongoing violence and destruction wrought by colonialism and capitalism (including relentless growth, consumption, extraction, exploitation, and dispossession).16 To build a world that we share, Mbembe insists, “we must restore the humanity stolen from those who have historically been subjected to processes of abstraction and objectification. From this perspective, the concept of reparation is not only an economic project but also a process of reassembling amputated parts, repairing broken links, relaunching the forms of reciprocity.”17

Most importantly, Mbembe’s reference to precolonial healing practices points to an elemental aspect of reconstruction: the inseparability of reparation from everything related to the land. Throughout the Indigenous world, any science of dwelling is rooted in land relations, as are Indigenous legal regimes, theories, stories, and the kinship relations to other earthly beings. (And as is colonialism, by definition, the access to land for settlement and extraction.) To specify the meaning of land for Indigenous relations, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that it is “everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustains us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world [was] enacted.”18

Land relations are not metaphorical; they are fundamentally methodological. They are methodological inasmuch as they assert the inseparability of bodies and lifeworlds while actively enacting protocols that do not “moralize maximum use, universalize, separate, produce property, produce difference, maintain whiteness.”19 These relations refuse metaphorical and compensatory gestures that fail to dismantle exclusionary spatial arrangements designed to sustain settler futures. And while they are specific to peoples and lands, their scope is planetary and in solidarity against ongoing dispossession, thus fostering cooperation among the incommensurabilities of different worlds, values, and obligations.

The struggle to reconstruct the common world lies in navigating the persistent and compromised afterlife of spoilage and the reweaving of palliative and nourishing relations. It creates an intrinsic ambivalence that we must tolerate and integrate into our work. Reparative interventions in art and transformative politics blend the soothing and ameliorative powers of aesthetics and “poethics” with the acknowledgment of the “total violence,” according to Ferreira da Silva, which threatens the durability of the world as we know it.20 This form of practice thrives on the tension between critical reckoning and “radical hope,” focusing on channeling these complex and antagonistic emotions rather than seeking mere redemption or immunity.

No Return to a Pristine Past

There is one other fallacy I would like to address when considering reparative effects on existing and future worlds. While reparation is multitemporal and originates in history, it cannot offer a path for returning to the past or any (mythical) wholeness. From the many concepts often used somewhat interchangeably to describe the ethics of repair, terms like “restore” and “renovate” imply efforts to reclaim a prior state or condition, grounded in ideals of how things should be founded on a past often imagined from the present perspective. In fact, the root of the word “renovation” is novus, indicating a process of making something new again.

Restorative interventions embody the promise of retroactive renovation. They aim to realize an idealized image of the past in the present while erasing any traces of disfiguration and constituent violence. While returning to the safe space of idealized history is often misleading, it also bears the danger of the resurgence of reactionary politics, defensive notions of collectivity, and forms of retro-nationalism. Looming large behind this notion is the dream of purity and revindication, both unhelpful for sustaining reparative work.

Hence, considering practices of reparation in the context of Remedios points toward serving individuals, communities, and their lifeworlds in a historically resonant but forward-moving manner. Remediation is not nostalgia, nor is it a utopian projection. It is work performed and actualized, always oriented toward the present and the possible futures that emerge from it. It is an intervention and a methodology invested in the here and now, a critical optic and potent strategy to counter forces of undoing, anxiety, and pessimism. If remediation is rooted in the here and now, it nonetheless must reckon with the past—not as a destination to which one returns, but as a historically denied reservoir of possibilities.

As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues in Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, the crucial distinction is between “returning in time,” often reactionary and nostalgic, and “returning in possibility,” which reopens horizons violently foreclosed and enables those who claim reparation to shape the world in their eyes, “outside of the outlines of imperial states.”21 Against the imperial temporality that seals crimes as closed and adjudicated, potential history calls for unlearning and refusing such closures. Repair, in this sense, does not replicate the past but rekindles potential conditions in which both individuals and their worlds can regain presence—through the activation of shattered possibilities essential for the continuation of worldmaking practices.

In the chapter titled “Repair, Reparations, Return: The Condition of Worldliness,” Azoulay is mostly interested in a dimension of reparation, namely the movement of reparations in response to disaster-generating regimes.22 Any account of reparative politics would remain incomplete without a discussion of this as compensation for systematic expropriation and violence, particularly under conditions that, from the perspective of the oppressors, are presumed to be long sealed. The cases for unsettled reparation claims are too many to be listed, with notable examples including the Transatlantic Slave Trade, plantation slavery and the genocides of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Jim Crow laws, the Palestinian Nakba, and on and on. Reparations remain unsettled both for strategic reasons and due to the persistence of disaster-generating systems, never fully abolished. This dynamic makes the descendants of “victims” appear to be mired in the past and colonial history, while the descendants of “perpetrators” focus on building the future.

The imperial principle, which is congealed in time, space, and the body politic, makes a world in common impossible, unless it is attended to. So, Azoulay writes: “Perpetrators and their descendants cannot decide on the nature of reparations, and they cannot extend them to others. An act of imagination is needed here, one that will allow us to recall that the political realm could be different, not only one that consists of the rulers and the ruled, perpetrators and victims, whites and non-whites, grantors and claimants of rights. An act of potential history would see descendants of perpetrators in the position their ancestors should have been in when crimes were perpetrated—that of returning what was taken and begging to be allowed a place in the shared world.”23 In line with this thoughtful assessment of potential history, veritable restitution is one that first and foremost makes reparations to the continuance of life itself—to the capacity of sociality to renew and extend—rather than merely to material damages.

Remediation, then, is an insistence on tending to the fractures of the world while resisting the very conditions that have produced them. It is to unlearn the historical fault lines of modernity, undo the authoritarian, xenophobic, and anti-ecological violence it originates, and cultivate livability on our planet. If repair is to become a political project rather than a private ethic, it must be undertaken collectively—through shared responsibility, solidarity, and in support of critical-creative practices that harbor different futures. It calls for a politics and a poethics that dwell within brokenness, binding together the temporalities of grief and possibility, and extending to the nonhuman the right to flourish. Perhaps what Remedios finally teaches us is that reparative labor animates the very possibility of social reproduction especially amid the damage wrought by austerity, crumbling infrastructures, extractivist economies, and now perpetual war.

NOTES

1. See “Dwelling Sciences,” in Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 32-33.

2. Nancy Fraser, “Climates of Capital,” New Left Review no. 127 (February 25, 2021): 96.

3. Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen and Achille Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary: An Interview with Achille Mbembe,” New Frame (September 5, 2019), https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1909/msg00047.html.

4. Nilsen and Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary.”

5. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, Information Age, v. 2 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 9.

6. Nira Yuval-Davis, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 20.

7. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 22.

8. Fred Moten, “Prepare to Imagine,”2022, https://zcmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Moten_prepare-to-imagine2.pdf.

9. Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” Harvard Educational Review vol. 79, no. 3 (September 1, 2009): 413.

10. Kader Attia, “The Field of Emotion,” 2018, http://kaderattia.de/the-field-of-emotion.

11. Nilsen and Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary.”

12. Nilsen and Mbembe, “Thoughts on the Planetary.”

13. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 180.

14. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 180.

15. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 181.

16. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar vol. 44, no. 2 (June 2014): 84.

17. Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 182.

18. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientiﬁc Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 17.

19. Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 79.

20. Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics.”

21. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), ebook.

22. Azoulay, Potential History.

23. Azoulay, Potential History.

Daniela Zyman is a Vienna-based writer, curator, and the artistic director of TBA21—Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, based in Madrid. Since the foundation of TBA21 in 2003, she has played a central role in shaping its program, curating over fifty exhibitions and contributing extensively to its publishing and commissioning initiatives. Zyman’s curatorial practice is rooted in material culture, artistic research, and ecological and post-disciplinary knowledge forms. She consistently engages with alternative epistemologies and speculative modes of world-making, positioning artistic research as a space of critical imagination and ecological thought. Previously, she served as chief curator at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art in Vienna (1995–2001), where she co-founded the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2003, she was the artistic director of the Künstlerhaus in Vienna and Director of A9 Forum Transeuropa. In 2024, she published The Laughter of the Jellyfish (German edition, Walther König), a monograph that articulates a prefigurative, antagonistic approach to artistic research and traces a genealogy of emergent counter-methods.