Urban Miscellanea
2020-2022, 2025
Urban Miscellanea is an experimental multimedia anthology that celebrates creativity situated within the urban.
2020/21: States of Apprehension
2021/22: Urban emergency / urban rhythms
2025: Archiving
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Jasmine Abu Hamdan2020/21
The Hakawati Forum
Video
Bio
Jasmine Abu Hamdan is a Lebanese-Palestinian architect who grew up in Jordan. She graduated from the Architectural Association and currently lives and works in London.
Her work focuses on reconstructing places of cultural heritage destroyed by conflict through intangible media, experimenting with narrative and broadcasted spaces.
Her reconstructions capture the narratives of marginalised voices struggling with issues around social and political structures. She creates spaces that build agency from intimate revelations to policy change, and ultimately question how we reconstruct and interpret heritage.
Within the context of cultural heritage being destroyed by conflict, citing Aleppo as a recent case, the Hakawati Forum focuses on using tangible and intangible media to construct events that condense and overlay spatial narratives onto new contemporary contexts. It looks at heritage as a prospective activity to understand the different forces at play in urban spaces and make counter forms of testimony audible. By broadcasting events and narratives around Aleppo's social and political conflicts, the Forum focuses on building discourses around these conflicts.
The Forum builds with the intangible. The event is built around an augmented soundscape that revives the lost spaces of Aleppo, bringing about many voices and building new pathways for the recollection of memories. The accumulated layers of the city are condensed into an arbitrary hangar in Amman to shape a narrative that puts different aspects of the city in dialogue.
The Hakawati Forum aims to capture the narratives of marginalised voices struggling with issues around social and political structures, build agency from intimate revealing experiences to policy change, create a space that allows people to interrogate dominant political and social constructs, and ultimately question how we reconstruct and how we deal with heritage.