Sonic Repairs to the Grid: Art Engages the Epistemology of Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca

Chapter 1 explores the sonic (repair) work of art in relation to the colonial modernist grid in Hay Mohammadi and the modernist mass housing that emerges from and within it. In reading Yto Barrada’s photography, Marion von Osten’s video mapping project This Was Tomorrow!, dancer Lahcen Zinoun’s film Le Piano, Fouad Souiba’s novel L’incompris de Hay Mohammadi, and the poems/songs by Nass El Ghiwane and Lemchaheb in Sonia Terrab’s documentary film L7asla, the chapter argues that art’s sonic repair work—the production of strategic quiet, vernacular articulations, vital cacophonies, and bodily vibrations—shifts our perspective from the visual reproduction of buildings and grids to the spaces of volume and amplification in between. This realignment redefines the location of housing history and produces definitions of ownership and heritage that mirror how residents use and remember the space.