This recorded conversation, premiering in conjunction with In That Same Hour, brings together researcher and artist Gida Hamam with artists Elo Vega and Rogelio López Cuenca to discuss the latter’s practice and contribution to the exhibition through their work Aquí Estaba (Here it Was).

The discussion explores questions of extraction, dispossession, and the making of modern imaginaries that sit at the heart of the artists’ practice, while reflecting on the intersections between the histories Vega and López Cuenca engage in their own contexts The conversation also considers how artistic work can reveal the political structures, erasures, and inheritances that continue to shape our present, and how these histories remain entangled with the urgencies of this moment.

The discussion will take place in Spanish, with English and Arabic subtitles.

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Gida Hamam is a visual anthropologist who works in the fields of art and anthropology and enjoys combining the two areas. Gida’s research has been on subjects such as Palestinian displacement and the creation of an audiovisual oral history archive of the Nakba (Al-Rowat for Studies and Research) and the relationship between objects, memory and identity amongst the Palestinian diaspora in Chile (The Palestinian Museum). Her work on olfactory geographies started during a residency at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile titled Artistic Creation on Body Politics in Migratory Situations, where her final work revolved around olfactory memory and maps based on the testimonies and memories of Syrian migrants in Santiago. She then carried out research for a project on landscape and olfactory memory in Gozo, Malta and developed that into a work titled Geography of a Scent which was exhibited at the Menier Gallery in London in 2017. Gida is an illustrator and lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and Art Appreciation at Al Hussein Technical University in Amman, Jordan, and the researcher behind Mahdoom.