Reversion (Wudu Diorama), 2025

With spices long used in medicine, cooking, and ritual practices across North Africa and West Asia, Ben Hamouda coats the architectural forms and salvaged wooden beams of this installation in dense layers that preserve even as they protect. The pigments cling to ogee arches inspired by structures she encountered in Spain, gesturing toward the Islamic heritage that endures across Europe. The spices exceed their material function: their scent saturates the room, sharpening perception and summoning a resilient presence in the face of histories marked by inhuman suffering. What first reads as ruin is steadied by deliberate acts of care.

Titled Reversion (Wudu Diorama), the installation invokes wudu—the ritual ablution performed before prayer or reading the Qur’an—while insisting on a total, vertiginous reversal. In close dialogue with contemporary political realities, Ben Hamouda entwines vulnerability with repair, refusing to separate fracture from mending. Antiquity, for her, is neither distant nor inert but activated through shared inheritance. Collapsed architectures emerge not as emblems of defeat, but as propositions of resistance—figuring cultural heritage as broken yet inhabited, contested, and continually remade.

Earlier version of this sculpture have been exhibited at Museo Casa Rusca, Locarno (2026) and Lower Cavity, Holyoke (2022).