Contested urban assemblages: ruination and restoration of postcolonial sites of memory

Recent work on ruination has explored the capacity of ruins to embody multiple and contradictory meanings within a single site. This paper considers the capacity of ruined sites of memory to disrupt the relationship between past and present, celebration and shame, Self and Other. Ruins produce new expressions of time and space that transcend the intentions of either architect or spectator. Restoration, however, may attempt to overwrite this ambivalence with a single, dominant narrative. As a case study, this paper turns to the garden of tropical agronomy, a palimpsestic ruin in the Parisian suburbs that gives material form to both the imperial past and the process of forgetting the empire. It traces the history of the garden, and various unsuccessful attempts to restore it, before considering the successful renovation of the Tunisian Pavilion in 2020. Drawing from Actor-Network Theory, it analyses these interventions as acts of translation that alternately attempt to impose a singular meaning on the garden and enrich to its multi-layered form. Despite the intentions of human actants, throughout its recent history the garden’s uneasy multivocality has endured. Amidst conflicting and overlapping narratives, the garden haunts post-imperial Paris and undermines its attempts to consign empire to the past.