 Good evening everybody. Welcome to the Russia tonight. And I'm delighted to welcome Maria Gomez Lopez. Are you there Maria? Hi. Who is in Madrid? Maria is an alumna of source, having gained an MA in the history of art and architecture of the Islamic Middle East. And she is now completing a PhD at the Universidad de Complutense in Madrid. She combines her research, professional and teaching practice at the history of art department of that university with the fellowship of the Spanish Ministry of Higher Education. She has been a research visitor at American University in Beirut, at Parion Pantheon Sorbonne, and she has shared the results of her work in different publications and academic events. Recently, in 2021, she has curated the exhibition Umundo de Retales, or A World of Snippets, at Casa Arabe in Madrid, which featured four contemporary artists on the history and experience of spaces on memory and lost lands. In her current project, Maria explores the convergence of art and cartography in contemporary art production from the Arab world, paying particular attention to the stories of the territory linked to personal experiences. Maria has kindly agreed to answer questions at the end of her talk. Please write them in the chat. You can write them during the talk or immediately after the end. And, well, welcome Maria and over to you. Good afternoon. You can hear me. Yes, it's fine. Okay, with new headphones I just borrowed. Let me share my screen. First of all, there we go. You can see the screen right. Okay, let me check. You can see a few faces there. So, there we go. If there is any problem with sound or image, please let me know before I keep on. But I think it's, it should work. Okay, so good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for your kind introduction, Anna. You explained it very well, actually, what I do and what I've been doing recently. And I also wanted to thank this invitation to this seminar. It's a pity that it has to be virtual, but I'm very, very happy to share with people linked to so as what I've been doing in the past few years. One of the things I have been working on, many of the paths that I've worked have a lot to do with what I studied and I researched at my year at SOAS. What I will be presenting today is the first brief overview of the research that I've been doing as part of my dissertation, that I will be defending in a month or a month and a half. And also, as this is a seminar of work in progress, I made an effort in presenting the project I'm currently involved in that have to do with the dissertation. First, I will explain very briefly the exhibition I curated and that opened in last October. And second, I will talk to you very briefly about the transformation of my dissertation into a children book. A challenge that allowed me to somehow approach completely different audience and that gave me the opportunity to jump out of academia. So, basically, as Anna said, what I explored in this dissertation was the convergence of art and cartography in the Arab world today. The aim was basically to examine how different artists were trying to complement and reinvent conventional ways of representing the world, so mainly maps, through their personal experience of the territory. The starting point was an awareness that in art and contemporary art from the Arab world, but also from many other places in the last decades. Many artists have turned to canonical cartography, have subverted the familiar maps, and have tried first to propose a critical look to this canonical narrative. Second, they have tried to reinvent these ways we have of describing the spaces we inhabit. So, basically, maybe what we could say is the first question I had with the research is, what is it that maps don't tell that we really need to produce so many other narratives that convey everything that is left behind. So, I'm not sure how things are in the UK. In Spain we grow completely surrounded by maps at the schools we have to learn by heart on the capital cities we have to learn the rivers, mountains, valleys, and basically we are even taught that the world is exactly how it's represented in maps. However, this is not so. This is something that I've learned during these years of research. Maps have proven to be subjective and selective processes and not objective and comprehensive representations of the world. Probably their familiar visual language and their reputation as precise artifacts can be traced back to the 17th, 18th century Europe. This is the moment when first cartography is consolidated as a scientific discipline, its goals are articulated and expanded. And second is the moment when imperialist expansion starts to take place, and maps play a central role in it. It is at this moment that maps become great tools of control and also symbols of power. They are collected in personal archives, in collections, they are hung in private and public spaces, they appear in paintings. It's interesting because this use of maps for this imperialist expansion is described by researchers such as Harley or Estrella de Diego in this way. In so far as maps were used in colonial promotion and lands claimed on paper before they were effectively occupied, maps anticipated empire. In the 17th century, Estrella says maps had been a mirror of reality in those years, reality started to be the reflection of the maps. So basically, this is when the map and its initiative and performative power starts to be, wait, I can't go to next, start to be evidenced. However, as I said, maps understood in their most conventional sense have always coexisted with other territorial expressions. As Mariana Masera says to walk paths to whistle territories to create stories to pray to dance or to draw maps are activities that have occupied men over time, tracing invisible networks of meaning to express through their lived or imagined experience their relationship with the world. This means that we have needed to develop different ways of express the spaces the spaces we inhabit and the ways we do so. Many of these other special narratives that accompany more canonic maps were to be retrieved in the 20th century. Before they were often dismissed for the supposedly subjective and imprecise nature. But in the middle of the special and many other terms, all these assumptions about cartography and maps as being precise artifacts start to be questioned. And also this has a lot to do with the fact that places to be considered not as a static location, but as a process as a construct that people redefine all the time through different interactions, gestures, and the different ways of being in the world. So basically, many researchers will say, OK, if place is a construct, if it's in permanent redefinition, maybe we cannot count on a definitive representation of it. So what we need is, let's say, a plural constellation of images that is open to change that is fragmentary, that it's ephemeral. So at this point, art starts to be a central tool not only to look to critically look at these more familiar and conventional cartography, but also to reinvent and to reinsert in the map everything the map does not tell. I just put these two very well known images, America invertida, the South America turned upside down by Torres Garcia in the middle of postcolonial drift and identity definitions. And then on the right, this reformulation of the map of the world by the surrealists, just as two examples you might be familiar with. The other world is not an exception in all this, let's say, look at maps, both critically and with a need of reinvention. This, of course, might come at no surprise because territorially and geographically speaking, the other world, it's a quite controversial region. On a great extent, it is the result of overlapping agreements and cartographic proposals from colonial and postcolonial times. As Karen Kulkasi puts it, the modern Arab world is the result of a disordered mapping exercise. First, in the colonial period maps were extensively used by European and other powers to organize and control the territories. And in the sense as I said maps were not only representing but anticipating and producing space. I just brought as a reference the Sykes-Picomat bump that accompanies the agreement with the same name in 1916. And on the right, I just brought this parody by the Dalul Das of these moments of overlapping agreements, red definitions. What you can see here is just a screenshot of a video in where different hands redraw a crumbling Ottoman Empire insistently until the edge of absurdity. Many of these colonial proposals would be naturalized in the second half of the 20th century, which is a moment of independence and the statehood. It's a moment of postcolonial drift and also of national transnational regional ideological and political movements. And that of course tried to produce, let's say, more indigenous territorial annunciations that were to be articulated around supposedly common elements. Of course, one of these proposals will be the Arab world that was mainly constructed in the framework of Pan Arabism, and that coexisted with many other geographical proposals. It's interesting because Karen Kulkasi, sorry for the microphone, Karen Kulkasi did a very interesting research on the maps that were produced in Arab countries in Arabic in these times. And she discovers that this is a moment when the Arab world becomes a sort of logo. It's represented with the silhouette delineated and thus separated from the rest of the world. In some cases, the national boundaries that separate the countries are erased. So somehow this Arab world becomes a metonymy first of a territory usually understood as the 22 Arab states that composed also other institutions such as the Arab League. And second, it's a metonymy of a transnational community that variably feels connected to some of the common elements that vaguely define Arabness. So basically, this counter cartography would somehow talk about all these post-colonial drifts, all these debates around identity, around autodetermination, and the maps will play a central role in it. So it's not exchange that maps, especially in art, will play also a central role in the 90s. When ongoing internal conflicts, massive displacements and the effects of radical globalization will lead to question the currency of an Arab world as a whole, another world as a unified region, at least as it was represented in previous maps and as it was trying to be articulated in the previous decade. So basically, this had an impact in the maps, in the arts, sorry, so from the 90s until nowadays many artists will start to subvert and also to reinvent the ways we have of telling the Arab but also many other worlds that compose it. In my dissertation, I analyzed a selection of these artworks, so basically I built a sort of an archive, I tried to give it sense, so finally what I did was to establish three central chapters in which I gather a group of quite heterogeneous works that somehow share in a way a considerable means of approaching the territories, either from a critical look, or from a personal experience. I would like to say here I won't stop a lot in methodology, of course I did a bibliographical review, I did my research studies, fieldwork and so on, but I wanted to share with you that one of the main main main and most important resources I found was conversations with specialists, curators, academics, but especially with the artist whose projects I analyzed. So basically, in this project I worked on, we can differentiate first the projects in which the artist explicitly go back to that Arab world as a logo, Arab world as a unity, and what they try to express or to materialize are all these cracks that somehow since the 90s are leading to question the currency of this notion of the Arab world as a whole. So among these artists we can find, for example, Muadad Nasser who has devoted a lot of his artworks and recent projects to explore the special impact of these overlapped cartographic proposals. One of the projects he did was this shutter glass, I think it's very visual explicit in which we see this other world isolated from the rest of the world made in shutter glass, and thus covered by all these fissures that somehow seem to evoke how this world might disintegrate, at least in this image of a unity. On the right you have the 22 untitled by, I'm going to try to minimize this, there we go, the 22 untitled the Arab world by Marwan Reshmawi, which is an installation in black rubber that was commissioned for an exhibition in Egypt, for which the he interviewed his dad who lived for a while in Egypt in the past century. So basically he realizes that the other world that his dad talks about and that he once lived has nothing to do with contemporary Arab world, and what he does is trying to translate all these fissures, all these differences in this big installation, in which what we can see is that this other world is transformed into a sort of archipelago, in which the different national borders separate very clearly each of the countries. Some other artists will go a step forward, and we will actually work on more unfeasible geographical reinventions. One is Paschal Alhub and the other world is my homeland. The title is taken from an Albaroudi song that used to be sung in Panadap times. He himself sang it at school in Palestine before, at first time in the morning. And what he does is to do a sort of parodic game of this other world is my homeland and the song says something like from Oman to Yemen, from Morocco to Palestine, we are just one and the other world is my homeland. So Baschal takes this and what he does is to produce an other world that is not only fragmented, but is transformed into a sort of vertical region with border precipices that completely disconnect each of the countries. And in an interactive proposal, Odaib Tukan will produce her newer Middle East. It's an installation in which the Arab countries are the result of superimposing two real cartographic proposals to redefine the Middle East. First, the Sykes-Picot signed in 1916. Second, the one proposed in 2006 by Lieutenant Ralph Peters. And what she does is to take the countries that result from this superimposition, transform the countries into magnets and invite the visitor to produce a newer Middle East. So she invites to do this game of cartography. She invites to redefine it. And finally, I brought these geographical tiles play just because it was a proposal the Saudi duo Brick Club did for London in 2019. I'm not sure if any of you had the chance to see it, but it was an installation that was located in three different parts of the city. And basically, the idea was to produce an Arab world with these pastel color seats in which the spectators could actually, as they say, do improbable alliances by sitting, talking and doing sort of, let's say, agreement, let's say, talks. In a way, again, giving the visitor the power of redefining that Middle East. In these pieces, I bet you can see that cartography operates both as an object and tool of reflection. So that's why in the dissertation I called these or I somehow gathered them as meta cartographies. So basically those pieces that do mimetic use of cartography to think of the practice itself and its effects. However, despite their critical approach, none of the projects offer an alternative territorial expression. They challenge this regional imagery. I think many of these artists actually say they are not identified with this kind of Arab world as a logo does not represent the experience they have of the territory they inhabit in the Arab world. Basically, they do this critic but they don't propose another way of rebuilding it or of re-enunciating. However, I of course did my research. I kept on reading and doing research on the different artists who worked with maps, and I found that there were many, many other artists that dive into the processes behind a special definition and find another way of conveying them. Many of them will use cartographic language and we subverted it in a way that we can recognize these pieces as maps, but of course they are not canonical maps. The first example I brought is the Wandering City series by Dina Diwan, a series in which she creates a cartographic portrait of Beirut inspired in her teenager journals. Written before fleeing the country during civil war in her journals, Dina elaborately describes the itineraries followed within the city to walk the dog, visit her grandma, go to the beach, go to school, whatever, but every special movement is registered in this journal. So 30 years later when Dina recovers these journals, she paints and embroiders these maps of Faciti, which of course it's articulated around memories, movements, narratives, and an embodied experience of place, but that doesn't exist anymore as such. You might know this eight channel video installation by Bushra Khalili called the Mapping Journey Project, in which eight clandestine migrants share the journeys undertaken in different parts of the Mediterranean to get to their current destinies. In the meanwhile, while they're telling the journeys they followed, they paint over a canonical map, the route they followed to get to where they are. So basically what they do is not only subvert a canonical map, but overlap to this common geography and experiential one. That in the epilogue of the project, the artist isolates from the map and transforms into a constellation. This is a gesture that refers not only to celestial charts that might guide nocturnal sailors, but it's also a gesture that deploys an alternative map based on an embodied experience. I also brought the examples of the work by Christine Gideon in series like her Aleppo reconstruction reconstruction. Christine left Sidia when she was very, very young, and she grew up surrounded by family memories and stories about this now vanishing country as she describes it. She only got to visit it once as an adult and at some point she decided to do a sort of maps of different places of the country. So basically in this Aleppo reconstruction reconstruction she elaborates a new run archive of these different places and then on the black blacks you have on the right, she writes the memories and stories her family and friends share with her. So basically the result is a collection of maps of lived and remembered spaces, but also of various times, generation and stories that have defined them. She takes a step forward and in her stitched works, she will reinterpret this aerial view of the map, and she will devote at least four maps to the different places she visited when she was in the country. This is very interesting because she actually reinvents cartography, proposing a very particular way of preserving Sidia through mapping, mending and patching. Of course, this kind of project reinvents the consolidated cartographic lexicon to accommodate overlooked narratives of place. These narratives are articulated around particular special practices, memories and imageries that define both who we are and the spaces we inhabit. And for this reason, as I think you can guess by now, I have called them throughout the dissertation carto biographies, which is a concept coined by Antonio Jesus Palacio Shorty to refer to experiential mappings. However, not all these carto biographies necessarily take up the linguistic codes of the map. Some artists will dive into new ways of documenting the world, and especially its inhabiting processes. In this sense, the pieces I'm going to show now, they don't focus in the shape of the world and try to visually convey it, but they actually do on the processes behind them. For this reason, what I propose throughout the dissertation is that these carto biographies might enable us to look to the riverside of the map. This is to all these processes that lie behind it, that define the territories that are later represented on them, but that somehow are not explicitly mentioned in this surface we are all so familiar with. Of course, these pieces might not be strictly understood as maps, but they may enable us to think of them in a more flexible way. In orientations, Ismael Bahre wondered through the Medina of Tunis with a glass full of black ink in his hand. The inky surface reflects urban fragments as the artist moves, and thus considering the symbolism of the black ink as writing tool. The video might be understood as a performative geography or earth writing practice, an enterprise that is not and is undertaken not only with ink and paper, but also through the gestures we make and the ways we have of being in the world. This emphasis on the gestures that shape the territory is what dictaphone group do in Nothing to Declare, which is a research project and a performance on the history and the special practices associated with the now defunct railway service that once crossed the Arab world. So basically, each of the members depart from Beirut in a different direction in Lebanon, northeast and south, getting to the not always penetrable borders with the neighbour countries. In their way, they visit abandoned or reformed stations, they follow the race, they gather testimonies and stories associated with the times the train was operative. What they do later is a performance in which they share all these stories and they map the special transformations the railway and its later dismantling have brought to the territory and its inhabitants. And in the process, what they aim at is embodying what the time some places we can see now once were and what they could be if people claimed this railway to be operative again. Finally, a final example of this carto biography that focuses on gesture on interaction on inhabiting are the video installations My Father Lands or Trace the Territory by Sineb Cedira. In this video the artist dives into the history of the lands her family owned in Algeria before they left to France. In the projects what she does is to superimpose images of herself and her father walking the plots talking about the past counting the states they take. But these images overlap, as you can see on the images with the documents and maps Cedira films in archives and in the registry. So basically what she does is to embody an historical narrative and a special practice to evoke the multiple elements that dialectically define the territory it's inhabitants and its narratives. Of course, as you can see, these pieces do not constitute an exact and systematized portrait of physical territories, they rather variously dive into some of the untold practices that continuously shape them. In the process, they produce a special narrative that comes to complement and reinvent more conventional ones, or maybe to show what has always lied behind them. As a brief slide I made for retrospective reflections, things I thought about when I finished this work when I started looking back at what I had written. I say that of course, all these multiple and evolving accounts of place are not something exclusive from the Arab world, and it's not something that is exclusive from our times art and cartography have encountered in many moments in history, and they have had very particular relationships in other centuries too. However, in this 20th century this look is critical is an intrinsic look to the processes that create these narratives of the territory. And what is interesting is that many artists from different places in the last decade are producing these sort of cartographic reinventions. And thus we might think that they are articulating a sort of a global art less leaning on art on experience these atlas challenges and reinvents the way we have of telling the world. Of course this doesn't imply that conventional maps are not useful anymore, just that the narratives they convey and with them their own nature are being amplified. As you have seen I'm very interested in the centrality of lived experience so basically how to learn the aerial view and tell the world from the lived experience, because I believe this personal experience comes to assert the human and imaginary side of cartography. But also because these centrality evidences that are dwelling rituals are what shape the places the histories and the stories we tell, and thus that these special practices should be quite conscious and critical. Precisely in this sense this carto biographies may also enable us to transcend some of the rigid geographical and mental lines that for centuries maps have consolidated, inviting us to develop other possible territorial bones practices and imaginaries. In relation to the Arab world Diana now we would express something similar any brass. She said, but before we throw out our maps, pardoned as they are, is it possible to redraw and to rethink them. Can we find use in them as open metaphors and generative platforms that serve not to classify an idea of a region, but rather help us to locate meaning within the contours of a broader world. So here starts the last part which is is is not as long as the previous one. This is the one that has to do with the work in progress, and this is the part that somehow opens to all the uncertainties. And what it has when finishes a dissertation and thinks well is there a life beyond the PhD is there life beyond academia. Well, I'm not sure I can I can tell now, but I will share with you this very brief reflections about what I would love to do in the future and what I'm doing and I will be doing in the in the very very short future. First, of course, I would love to resume all the pending projects that especially cobit didn't allow me to finish, especially all the conversations I couldn't have all the states I couldn't do. And finally, the trips that have remained on the email and on the to do list. And that would help me to, of course, develop more of this research. In a more theoretical way, I would love to transcend the the regional framework to dive into more local context, not only countries or cities but I put there also neighborhoods, even a street or a house, and to try to see you know how these artistic creations operate or complement perceptions on more small territories. In terms of regions, I would love to see what's going on in Latin America, because I think it has a very historical, very similar historical drift to the Arab world. I have been reading in parallel of course I didn't have to do to be at this at the same time one is enough, but Latin America it's a region that I'm very interested in, in terms of art and cartography. But of course, and in a very coherent gesture, I would love to transcend territorial categories, and look, I say at disparate works, works that maybe transcend definitely this cartographic languages, and that I don't need to compare what they propose to previous narratives just works that express the territory in explicit and exclusive maybe experiential way. The last two objectives are maybe more utopic but one of them actually happened. So I remain confident. The first is to go, of course beyond academic boundaries, and to do an applied research. We all inhabit daily. I mean, we are all in permanent interaction with places everything happened in a place. We are every day sharing the territories we we are in. Basically, I would love to be more conscious of the ways I particularly am in the world, and also the way I share my world with other people. And also, beyond academia, I would like to experiment other methods, other languages, other platforms to reach to different audiences, and somehow see what this dissertation can do in these other worlds. So this is the last part of this talk, because as I anticipated, this is something that actually happened before I could defend. Of course, an exhibition it has a lot to do with academia to but it's a different platform. I really curated this exhibition that's in Spanish as a very well pronounced that was very surprised. It's, it's entitled Un Mundo de Retales, and it was vaguely translated as a world of snippets. Retales in Spanish has to do with patchwork. It's a piece of textile is a fragment, but it has a very positive view because you can actually join it to order retales and create something completely different. And you can get a different view of that initial retale. You will understand why this is the title. When I was invited to make a proposal about about my dissertation to be exhibited at Casa Arabe, which by the way it's a very interesting institution is a public institution part of the diplomatic system in Spain. When I was invited, I was actually working on the conclusions of the PhD. So I was thinking about how the world is made by these permanent overlapped interactions. How, of course, it is under permanent construction which evidences that it might not be possible to produce a definitive image, cartographic or not of it. At the same time, in this crazy writing moment I was reading a beautiful book by Graciela Esperanza. It's a book that is translated something as something like Portable Atlas of Latin America, and she speaks of a networked making of the world. So basically how the world is interwoven, how the world is full of interactions between people places and times. The idea of the network, this idea of interwaving, somehow rang a bell and my proposal was, okay, let's work on my dissertation topic, you are now familiar with, but from a textile perspective. Let's translate this idea of interwaving through textile. Basically, the proposal I made was to bring these four artists you can see on the screen. I mean next night as my Lisa Christine Gideon and Phil one answer. The four of them presented projects that were either made with textile techniques or using textile materials, and all of them articulate various personal and experiential narratives of different places. They have inhabited or they have a connection to. I don't have the time to explain very thoroughly each of the projects but I just wanted to show you some of these images. And to just, I mean, I'm very thankful to these four artists and I think the best way I can think is also sharing the projects they brought to Spain. The first one is as my Lisa whose projects overlap the images of the Iraqi rivers and date bonds, both central elements of her connection to a land Iraq, she left when she was young and she never revisited. The second artist is a Saudi designer and an artist who is Phil one answer her projects are related to the architectural and textile boundaries the body daily inhabits. She reflects on the way the body adapts to an interacts with these different limits that we daily, we daily perform. I've already talked about Christine Gideon and her maps on a vanishing Syria reconstructed through family and personal stories, memories and imageries. And finally, we also counted with the presence of Amina X nine. She's an amazing architect and artist who presented these garden inside. This is an exhibition that reflects on the interaction between the inner and outer world, and how both die electrically define each other. This is a very brief visit to the virtual visit to the exhibition, this is the first time I do this virtual visit. The exhibition has the opportunity to traveling to core of traveling to Cordoba. The exhibition finished last Sunday in Madrid. Today, we just installed and next week, we will open at the at Casa Arabi headquarters in Cordoba, which is a beautiful and that I'm sure the exhibition will magically work there. And finally, I will close with this last crazy project that takes me, I think, far from academia, even, and that was a huge, huge challenge. Even I think more than the exhibition because implied, of course, speaking and sharing my dissertation otherwise. This is a children book that I wrote with my very, very talented sister, she's an architect, designer, teacher, I mean, I can promise she's the talented one. So basically we collaborated to publish this book as part of the drama research group, which is the group I've been part of in the past years. It's entitled in Spanish lo que esconden los mapas otras formas de contar el mundo, which is basically translated in English as what maps conceal other ways of describing the world. So basically, the idea of this book was first to elaborate a story that reflected on how maps operate. So basically, we tried with the supervision of teachers, and I don't know how you say in English, pedagogy, people who work on pedagogy, I guess, I'm not sure if I'm making it up. So basically, what we did was first a narrative story in which we questioned actually this ability of maps to tell the world we inhabit and the way we do it. So we tried to transmit this fact that many of the spaces children and adults of course occupy are not reflected in maps as such. So what we proposed you can see in those big letters was to do these maps from below. So basically we invite the reader to produce his or her own maps. It's one of the stars of the constellation leader, so we didn't want to take something from the map we took it from the sky where there are no borders painted yet, or not as much as in the as on Earth, and you can see the turtle of course is upside down. So basically what we proposed is this idea that maybe if we all do a collaborative Atlas, maybe if I put my world together with yours and if we have all these voices brought together, maybe we can produce a more exact and a more, let's say polyphonic narrative of this changing world. But of course we didn't do, we didn't, we didn't send all these homework to children to go to your house and do maps. So we also did that exercise, and we spent many months drawing our own maps, and thinking of all the things that conventional maps, the ones we have at home, the ones we use when we travel, the ones we were taught as cool, don't tell. So I just brought this example as a way of closing my intervention, which is one of the maps we made. It's entitled my yesterday or something like that, media de ayer. So what I did yesterday, it's a map in time. So basically we tried to conceal the different spaces and activities one can do during the day. And that of course are so ephemeral that are not always represented in any map. So, basically, I just wanted to bring these two free inventions to trips, the dissertation took to show that the research, even though if in the form of dissertation is done, it's in permanent evolution. And especially that it's still taking me to many different people, places and formats, and that maybe my, let's say, prospective conclusion, my wish, my desire is that it keeps me doing so. So thank you for listening and happy to answer any comments or questions or whatever. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Maria. That was really interesting. And, and so full of imaginations and full of ideas. And I really love the children project. So, yeah, fantastic, fantastic. Please do write your points and questions in the chat. And while we're waiting for that. I was, you know, you talked about that artist, Christine Gideon, who works on Syria. And I was reminded of the artist Tiffany Chung, I don't know if you know her. And, and in particular, the Syria project that she has about 40 maps where the artist is mapping the colonial history linked to the MENA region, which affected obviously greater Syria. So she's mapping conflicts, displacement, the migration movements caused by war. And in doing so, she reveals narratives and histories of the people involved. And to do that, she also needs to the contribution of the communities. So she establishes, you know, centers in which the communities have various activities, and they contribute to this idea of a map. I just want wanted to know whether you, you had any reflections on, if you know how work and if you had any reflections on that, and whether sort of it echoes any of the work you're doing. And the other aspect that she brings in is that of gender. So the element of gender which hasn't come through your seminar but I wonder whether you are also thinking about that. Thank you, Anna. I have to write down. I have a very, very poor memory for short time. I mean, for these questions I just take some notes. So regarding community mapping or the importance of community, many of the artists I've talked to, they have worked on this idea, not only of gathering testimonies and experiences but also have literally worked on collective maps. And in fact, there is something, this is something that they pre-indicate a lot. But I think of course maps, I mean, there is no, maps are always produced collectively in a way. I mean, of course, gathering the information and passing it through whatever territory time. There's not only one person producing a map. I think a map is a collective action in any case. But it's, the change is what kind of community is involved in producing that map. If it's a, let's say, political group, no or a selection of scientists or whatever, instead of the people who are inhabiting daily those territories. And also, I don't remember the names of two artists I came across in the, I mean, when I was finishing the dissertation, one was working from France about Morocco. And the other one I don't remember. I couldn't work on their projects, but they were doing very interesting things with an alphabet people and the potential of expressing their territory in a graphic way. And it was super interesting. They made a lot of workshops. I mean, if anyone is interested, I can have a look and retrieve their names. But I was very, very interested about this idea of people who don't read or write or are not familiar with this more conventional which is how they express in a graphic way their words. And regarding gender, it's something I always avoid, because I think it's a very, it's a slippery thing. Of course, many artists, especially the artist from the exhibition that has been a great question all the time, why for women, what has to do, I mean, why women doing maps. And why a woman waving, I mean, which is a very technique that is quite linked and associated with a female world. It's something that has come across the dissertation, of course, and especially this contrast between more canonical mappings being done mainly by male collectives, and many of these counter mappings being made by women. I still have to further explore that topic. But of course, I think there is a gender dimension in all this, especially because also many of what they're claiming is not an impositive language is not a codified one is something that has more to do with intuition. It's something that has more to do with handicrafts with things that somehow until very recently at least have been connected more to a female than male world. But it's a garden I didn't want to step into because I wasn't too many at that point. But I think it's a very interesting question. And it's something I definitely have to go back. I think for the following seminar, I will put it in the slides of prospective conclusion. Okay, thank you very much, Maria. We have a couple of questions in the chat. So Jada Vercelli says pre-colonial Australia was the last land mass on earth in a habitat, not by herdsmen, farmers, but by hunter-gatherers. As told by Bruce Chatwin in the songlines, the building of infrastructure erased the topographical references aboriginal people used as a reference for survival and invalidated their oral culture as aboriginal people used songs to pass these topographical references from one generation to the next. Have you come across any evidence that a similar process has happened also in the GCC countries after they converted their economic model from pastoral to the exploitation of hydrocarbon resources in the 1960s? And what do you expect to happen now that they are converting their economic model from the focus on resources underground to the sources of the ground? This is a long text I have to reread a bit. Can you see the chat, yes? Yes, I can see. Wait, I will do it bigger because otherwise I won't see it. By the way, I recently discovered this songlines by Chatwin by a very, I'm not sure if Jada is your name. I'm not sure if you understand Spanish. No, yes. There is a podcast that is called Cabinete de Curiosidades and it's a podcast where I discovered this actually this book by Chatwin. She's an amazing woman and she speaks a lot about culture, art and many, I mean, many different things. It's very easy podcast. So I go back to your question. I didn't see this happen in the in the Gulf. I mean, I can't talk about a very explicit or a very specific example. But I really am really, really, really interested about this idea of the oral culture as a way of building a topographical knowledge. And I have particularly worked on an artist you might know who is Jumana Emil Abut. She's a Palestinian artist and she's trying to rebuild the land that's being erased through folk tale and oral tradition. So when Anna was reading this text, somehow I thought of Jumana and this interest she has of remapping in a non-cartographic way this disappearing land. And she has a beautiful project in which she is recovering all those magical places that are mentioned in the stories that women used to tell at home. These places actually have a correspondence in reality. I mean, the well where you can get immortality in this tale is in this village. So what she's doing is going to these villages and try to do this mapping of a sort of a more indigenous knowledge of all these people that used to go to that well to ask for immortality. So I can't share with you an example related to the Gulf, but this is something that fascinated me for a very long time with Palestine specifically. And what do I expect? I mean, that's a big question. I mean, I can't answer that. I'm sorry. I have no idea. There is, I guess you might know this project by, wait, what's his name? I will say it. Is this Lebanese photographer who traveled the Gulf countries producing an archive of all the carcasses, all the abandoned buildings related with the oil industry. And he was trying to do a sort of archive of this black geography, as he says, that has completely transformed, that has completely transformed the landscape. And he is, oh my God, I'm not going to remember it, but I can see it under, see it under. See, wait, I will write it here. See it under. And he does this project on on on the Gulf and it is all the shoreline he travels there and he's just like taking these pictures of how this, let's say, thing coming from underground is transforming what happens over crown. Very interesting. Thank you. We have Hamid Kashmir Shekan. Thank you for your very interesting presentation. I wonder if you could elaborate a little more on the difference between the first category subversive approach and the second intervention and reinvention. And how do you distinguish them. Also, I'm curious if, if you have included whale shell case fantastic or remapping of Arab history. Thank you, Hamid. I am very happy you are in this talk and now I'm a bit nervous actually. I have read you a lot. You are in the pages of that dissertation and that's also in the, in the previous slides. So thank you so much. And Karen Pinta I'm seeing also too. That's a very good question about this contrast. Of course, this is something a reviewer of the PhD said the dissertation took a very intuitive path. I mean, in academia we are required to do all these theoretical framework methodology and all these things, but I have a very intuitive way of doing. And then when I look back, I built all these frameworks retrospectively. So for me, these kind of categories were a way of somehow classifying these different groups that allowed me to evoke the kind of gesture they did regarding cartography. So maybe what I can say is that in this subversive approach, the artists are willingly deconstructing cartography in a critical way. They are actually not happy with their representations cartography make of the territories they inhabit or they are interacting with somehow. And I think the very invention has more to do with the need of telling something else. Of course they are too connected it's not that they are completely opposite. Many of the artists that are reinventing cartography do so by subverting it, and many of the artists that subverted, I personally don't think that they reinvent they don't propose something else. They do so to offer a critic, but I don't think they're proposing a new way of telling the world or they're not trying to convey a different narrative. So I think the difference might be that. And I haven't included this project which I really love. And I have it in the I mean I have like the archive I worked on and then the infinite catalog that of projects that I didn't have the time to go through. And but definitely it's a it's a it's a very good project to to deal with in the terms of my dissertation. Thank you so much for for the for the message. Thank you. Karen Pinto. Why not consider Islamic maps. Not all are medieval copies continue into the 19th and 20th centuries. Some contemporary artists have included these maps in their artwork. I'm puzzled why you leave them out. Thanks for a talk rich with images. Thank you Karen. Hi there. So that's a great, great, great question. Actually, even medieval maps, I would also be very happy to to dive into but of course I didn't have the, not only the expertise and also the energy to go from archive to archive, but I'm completely fascinated by medieval Islamic maps. Because of sometimes the very experiential way they tell the world. What the, the question is very is a very good one. One of the main challenges of the dissertation was to face the fact that I was working with something called the Arab world, what is the Arab world anyway, how it was built. What I, I mean, I departed from this category that of course overlaps with the Islamic one. With Islamic world one, I mean, but I went for, I went for maps that were, I mean, that had to do with another world as, as, as we know it in a modern sense. At some point in one of the choices I had to do was to live the idea of an Islamic world that it's also a notion that I should dive into deeper. But I really I just focused on on this idea of Arab world explicitly. Okay, thank you very much, Simon Omira. Thank you very much for a wonderful lecture, Rich would be in understatement. Like Anna, I wondered when if you would raise the question of gender. And like Karen, if you would mention maps of the pre-modern Islamic world, things for the when the dissertation is published as a book. Okay, thank you again, we'll never look at maps in the same way. Sorry, again without asking ourselves about the hidden under sites. No, I created you. I don't know how you say talk I created you an obsession. I will be guilty for that you will be just looking at maps like what is not being told here. Thank you so much, Simon. I actually, even if he hides there, Simon is the responsible of the fact that I started diving into these things. He supervised many of my essays at SOAS. And it was the, the person who actually pushed me to go further into this idea of inhabiting. It's, I would love to say just a small thing that this all started as a very, very personal experience because I couldn't find my place in London. So, actually he was telling me look you have to look at yourself how you make yourself at home. How are you feeling at home in London. So, basically what I was trying to to to examine in an academic sphere became, I mean I became like the test I became the laboratory I was looking at myself to understand what what other people were trying to convey in their artworks. And I'm very, very thankful for that. I wonder when if you would raise the question of gender. I don't know when I will work on that but it's I repeat it's a very interesting. It's a very interesting terrain I will have to step into at some point. Many people is asking that now. I mean not here only but I'm starting to feel embarrassed, because I think I really need to go there I really need to explore that further. In the pre modern Islamic world. That's also a very, a very interesting thing I would love to dive into. In the dissertation I briefly mentioned the relationship between art and cartography in the Islamic pre modern Islamic world. I briefly mentioned how, I mean, I didn't do that research on my own that's why I don't want to share it here but other people have have explored this convergence of art and cartography in a known professionalized word, in which many crafts man, we're doing crafts man we're doing this kind of maps and so on so I won't go into that now. But I think, of course, we have so many kinds of maps to look at, and so many proposals, not only regarding the Arab or Islamic or whatever world we're talking about but also in relation to many other places. It should be interesting to to dive into all of them. But I think, even though many researchers, let's say, overlook the importance of comparing what artists do in relation to what it has been done in a cartographic field. I am almost ready to, let's say, forget maps and go for something else. I mean to focus on the artist side, sorry, and maybe not be comparing every time with previously made maps. And what else? Ah, when it will be published, well, that's a big word I think now I will have to, that's another big garden to do all the editing and to see what stays, what goes, what everything, especially because in Spain, I believe in the UK dissertations are shorter here we do like huge books that have to be very much worked to to be launched in the format of a book of course but that will be a great challenge to. Thank you, Simon. Okay, thank you. Gianti Merotra. I would be very interested to know how you conceived of this theme for a PhD which has led to the other activities you mentioned or was it vice versa. Was it something on the MA that sparked your interest? I find it very creative with scope to go in many directions even intuitively. So you, you partially answer that. Yeah, actually, actually you got me. I mean, you anticipated the answer I gave previously. Yeah, mainly at the Masters. What sparked my interest was that this idea of living in a in a foreign city where, for me at least loneliness but especially feeling, feeling for a inner was something a bit endemic. So finding my place and also trying to share with my colleagues and be the friends I made there. How was my home back in Spain, for example, what were my routines, somehow made me realize that the places are very connected to the actions we do. I've always been fascinated with maps, but I confess that even though I love maps and very bad at using them. So maybe one of the things I could say is that maps don't show the world as I see it clearly because the right is not on the right and the left is not on the left. So I really need maps that are made otherwise. So maybe I could say that too. That's an important thing. And finally, in Spain, even though we have a very, very strong historical connection with the Arab world. There are a few people working on contemporary art, and especially still we daily see many preconceptions prejudices. We see that basically there are many majorities that aren't do not correspond with what the people who inhabit whatever is the Arab world have. So basically, another thing that sparked this interest was first doing a dissertation on a topic people were not working on in Spain. And second to challenge the majorities we have and to prove that maybe there were other possibilities and other ways of talking, of approaching and of conceiving, not only maps of course, but the Arab world. So basically, I think these are mostly some of the, of the things that come to mind when, when you when I read these conceiving the team PhD and so on. And then the other activities I mentioned were actually a result of the dissertation so I was brought to many different places, but I'm particularly interested in the ones that are not exclusively academic. As you very well said, I work very intuitively, and I like the challenges I can find. Of course, academia is full of challenge. I don't say so. I mean, of course you have many things to face. But I think out of academia for me at least in such an experiential research, I have a lot of things to learn. So, so basically what I'm doing is just follow the current and try to explore and to learn in new projects. I look forward to your book, happy to share map images in my collection and Simon to everyone. Maria's dissertation is as you might expect on the basis of tonight's talk, brilliant. And I for one cannot wait to see. Simon and Kyden. Thank you so much. Right. Can I just ask you a last question from a promise you must be exhausted by now. I told you if it went very long, I would open a wine. I told you before. I just, I was wondering, you know, you talked about the, these artists that work with textiles. And embroideries, etc. I was wondering what material did they use for for textiles and embroideries and whether the material has any significance in relation to the maps they're doing. Yes, that's a very good question. The artist I worked for the exhibition. I showed the images. I can show it now because I have on the slide, I think. No, not this one. Well, asthma, which is the one that work on palm trees and I don't know how you pronounce it in English degrees and a practice. So the Iraqi rivers, which is this lady here. I didn't bring the big piece we brought by her, which is a huge burlap with all the rivers embroidered on it. She takes the two rivers. She actually takes them. They isolate them from the map and she embroider them in different materials. And in the case of the big piece, it's very interesting because she uses burlap because she says she found out that palm trees are part of the Phoenix family. What means that they easily adapt to live in foreign terrains. So basically she says palm trees as I am, they are migrant beings. So in the case of this burlap, it's very interesting because asthma, what she does is to take the textile that they use to cover the head of the tree before the tree travels. So basically she says is the traveling dress the palm has. And what she does is to embroider there the rivers. So that's when the punchy gets to a new house. She doesn't forget that she can actually grow there. So for example with asthma, the textile has a lot to do with what she's trying to convey. In the case of Philua Nasir, she works on very, very different materials for the exhibition. We brought three pieces, this big one on tool, which is an evocation of the abaya. Then we brought also four pieces on archive paper that I didn't put into this presentation. And the one you can see on the right is a project she did for Sarja, which is called tactile mapping. And the title says it all. It's a work that is made on latex or natural latex, which is a reference to the skin. So what she's doing actually is a reference. Well, I mean, it's a very long story. She works on the last inhabitant of a house in Sarja. And what she wants to do is to offer her a sort of metaphorical body to come back to this house she was expelled from. So basically this tactile mapping, she uses this latex as a way of building her address, building her a new space with this architectural plan to enable her to reinhabit this house again. So yes, in the case of Philua, the different materials have a lot to do with the message she's trying to convey. With Christine, she works on archive paper. I mean, she's working with this reference to archive. So it has, I mean, it's not a particular thing she has with the material, but on the very big textiles that are framing the Aleppo reconstruction, reconstruction project. She used how you say she used seaweed machine. It's the only artist that didn't do this by hand. She's actually saying the seaweed machine and then we come back with gender is something very related to woman. I want to do my map with this, with this machine basically. So she doesn't use a particular material that is related to the message she's working on. But yes, the, the, the technique, it's definitely something that has to do with it. And finally, and I finished my long answer. Amina, in this very specific project, she worked with wool and wire. And this has to do with a very deep concern Amina has with a craftsmanship in Morocco. She has spent the past, I don't know how many years, I think past 30 years, traveling across Morocco trying to do a map on the different workshops that are doing traditional craftsmanship in the country. And she found that the best way she had of preserving them was actually collaborating with his artisans and inviting them to collaborate with her in the artworks. This is one she did during lockdown in COVID. So basically this is one she only worked with another person with the, with the chef, but the materials have more to do with this preservation of the land in a different sense. And the preservation of these craftsmanship that speaks of, I mean, ancestral traditions. Thank you very much very interesting and thank you very much for, for a very good seminar, Maria, and that prompted such a wonderful discussion. So a virtual applause. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. I wish you all the best for the future and for your project. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for sharing this virtual world for a while. It's also a world to be mapped, I think. So thank you so much. And I hope to meet you sometime in person and to share more projects in the future. Thank you so much. Okay. Okay, bye bye. Thank you. Bye.