Moroccan Poet Abdellatif Laâbi Reading in London

The following comes to us via the poetrytranslation.org site. If you're in London, perhaps you can check it out:

Abdellatif Laâbi at The Mosaic Rooms
The Mosaic Rooms, London
Wednesday 20th February 2013 19:00

Prize-winning Moroccan poet, Abdellatif Laâbi will be joined by his translator, André Naffis-Sahely, to read from his newly published chapbook of poems and to launch his memoir, The Bottom of the Jar.

The Bottom of the Jar (published by Archipelago Books) is an exploration of Laâbi’s childhood city of Fez, Morocco, through Namoussa, his semi-fictional kindred spirit. The memoir is not only a personal account of Laâbi’s early years, but a work of great social and political import, one that reflects on and evokes the charged atmosphere during the final days of French colonial occupation of Morocco and its painful road to independence.


The Mosaic Rooms
Tower House
226 Cromwell Road
London, SW5 0SW
www.mosaicrooms.org/

020 7370 9990

Cost: Free

Colonial Modern: A Book About Moroccan and Algerian Post-Colonial Architecture

Here is a piece from Wallpaper on the book Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions of the Future, edited by Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali and Marion von Ostman. It seems to be an interesting attempt to understand the aesthetics of building in the Maghreb in the modern period.
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Book: Colonial Modern
Architecture
By Jonathan Bell

'Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions of the Future' is a very timely look at the impact of Western Modernist architecture on the colonial and post-colonial countries of North Africa, and one of the first attempts to untangle this complex mesh of ideology and aesthetics.


The genuine economic advantages of building in steel and reinforced concrete enabled large swathes of new housing to be built across the region. But with the whitewashed walls came some rather unsavoury presumptions, particularly the idea that the colonies were a sandbox for architectural experimentation, free from the 'heritage' concerns of the Western city. 'Colonial Africa was transformed into a laboratory for Western modernity,' writes Bernd M Scherer in his introduction, adding that these large-scale ventures in system building were subsequently re-imported back into Europe in the post-war years.

For the proponents of 'heroic' modernism, the deserts of Algeria and Morocco represented unbounded opportunity. There are plenty of striking buildings illustrated within, but their iconic time in the sun was short-lived. Now, over half a century later, the most fascinating parts of Colonial Modern are the way modernist sterility has been reappropriated and altered, a messy hierarchy of spaces that reflects the complex - and now crumbling - power structures that emerged in the post-colonial era.

Densely illustrated and impeccably researched, Colonial Modern pulls in aspects of architectural, cultural and political history to provide a fascinating look at the dangers of aesthetic imperialism.