THE FRAGRANCE OF SPICES

The scent of spices. Intense and heady. The olfactory experience is something physical, real, concrete. It has not yet found an equivalence in the technological world but qualifies as something deeply anchored in the perception of reality and the world of experience. Monia Ben Hamouda (1991, Milan) remains firmly anchored, despite being part of that generation of artists who grew up in the technological era. Perhaps her family history places her between two cultures (Italian and Tunisian), bringing her closer to traditional practices such as her father’s calligraphic art, and the use of powders as pigments to create installations. Fascinating settings, susceptible to the passage of time, to slight variations. But it is above all language, that of signs and calligraphic symbols distorted by the artist, which in her work become sculptures capable of constructing a new dialogue between past and future.

Elena Solito: I would like to start with a recent work of yours to introduce your research. From the subtraction of writing. Or more precisely the art of calligraphy (of family tradition), which is a hallmark of your work. Delicate and elegant sculptures that refer to language, but which are absent from the latest NYX exhibition at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan, which you created in dialogue with Maude Léonard-Contant. I am interested in the point of view you mention in your conversation with Attilia Fattori Franchini (together with Maude and curator Gioia Dal Molin), about the work produced. It affirms and destroys your own practice.

Monia Ben Hamouda: As you said, this piece represents a turn in my sculptural and formalization path, working on different layers of representation. And as I said to Attilia on Flashart, I see this sculpture as a radicalization of what has always been my practice’s central themes and junctures, as if to invalidate and reinforce them simultaneously. So it is a piece generated by a profound sense of frustration and the impossibility of articulating a language around it; therefore, a lot of this sculpture is more viscerally than linguistically articulated, and the turmeric plays a big role in this.
The impetus to work on Burial of All Meanings comes from my desire to formalize a piece that could contain but also destroy my own practice, like an implosion, a kind of theorization of the collapse of my work, and that was very linked to different topics such fragmentation, collapse, anger, sterilization of meanings, and the concept of ruins as a politicized space. Eventually, it attempts to resonate with notions of flattening consciousness and moral apathy as vivid, alive structures of human society. The burial gesture created by the sculpture itself is linked to all of it.

E.S.: I referred to writing in your work, in a generic way. Sculptures are actually signs, abstractions, sometimes figurations. Tell me about this. The role of language that becomes a symbol.
The role of iconoclasm and representation. Tell me about Aniconism, floating in space.
M.B.H.: The series Aniconism as Figuration Urgency (2021-ongoing) is certainly related to embracing prohibitions to create new language layers. The environment in which I grew up and the one from which I was excluded has always been a burning source of inquiry for me. I found it very important, very formative, to see how art and art history were viewed within my family and my culture. What was allowed, what was forbidden, and how I could move in that environment, trying to balance the Western view of art history that I was taught at school and the one my family, and the artists that were part of, valued.
Surely my practice is significantly inspired by calligraphy, which stands as an extended part of Arabic culture, as well as on my own personal history, and it’s mostly based on exploring and following the belief that each individual is inextricably connected to their family tree and to the psychological universe of their ancestors. Representation is the underlying theme of this series of sculptures. It is a subject related to my personal history and my family’s identity.

E.S.: Regarding the materials you use, there are two aspects that I find interesting. The absolutely contemporary technical approach (such as laser cutting) and the use of spices instead, recall an ancestral practice. I’m interested in your use of spices. Because they have something magical, transcendent, and ritualistic. Using this substance as a pigment, my attempt is to physically stimulate the viewer and their experience of the work. I think of your latest works that I have seen (at the Museion in Bolzano, rather than at the Cassina project, or even at the Istituto Svizzero in Milan), and of the intense perfume that they give off. The olfactory component produces an enthralling effect on the viewer. It acts in the memory, a bit like the Proust’s madeleine. When I think of those works, the memory of the smell of spices comes to mind.
M.B.H.: The smell serves as the conduit through which I channel the divergent forces that have shaped my identity.
Of course, memory and smell are strongly connected and reinforce each other. It was intense for me to see how my work often generates a physical reaction in the viewer, that, depending on which spice or powder I use, could feel attacked (starting coughing, crying, sneezing, and often obligated to leave the space), or curated and understood (when the spice is sweeter). Generating a physical reaction often before the observation of the piece, brings the work inside the lungs and the body of the viewer. It is a very visceral approach to art that I want to explore more, and that in the end is one of the dreams of each artist: to give, strong, physical reactions that the viewer will never forget.

E.S.: By the way, with the work presented in the group show RENAISSANCE at the Museion – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano, curated by Leonie Radine, you won the prestigious VG Award of CHF 60,000 given by the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation
M.B.H.: That was very unexpected. I was extremely concentrated on working impeccably on the installation and on having a good presence in the show that I completely forgot about the award…but of course, I was very glad to be the winner.

E.S.: I think of more organic works: the bodies of Untitled (Purse, 2019), or the creatures of Extended protection, Allegori defense from CC Gallery in Malmö. Extensions of the human. Intersections, crossings between human and posthuman. On the occasion of the latter work you consider “the era of the human as refugee”. This vision, which I imagine refers to the idea of the posthuman, actually suggests broader readings.
M.B.H.: That series, and the entire show at CC were actually related to the idea of formalizing sculptures that would be able to manipulate the future, or to read it. I was trying to create objects able to protect me, to protect themselves. but mostly that could be able to allow me to make a wish, so linket to the act of desire.

E.S.: And to the more material ones such as Gymnasium (2020), Night of Hinnā (2021), Wudu Diorama installation, or the Chandelier (2022). They are more material, and organic works. With the use of natural
elements like wood and the use of spices.
M.B.H.: Some of the pieces you talking about are a direct, more mature developments of some first sculptural attempts that I made at the beginning of my career. Reasoning on symbology, at that time I started concentrating on formalizing symbols, (or perhaps in deprive the material from its symbolic context). The material was firstly pork meat, chosen for its symbolic energy, strongly present in my biography since forever as prohibited food.

The pieces, for obvious reasons, were almost impossible to exhibit, but for me this process was a way to definitively understand that it’s man who creates symbols, to give name and power to objects. I understood and internalized the symbolic value of my gaze and my gesture as a human being and as an artist: following this principle, I was able to attribute strength and symbolism to all kinds of materials.

E.S.: There are two works of yours that I am very curious about and would like you to explore further. One is the experience of Orrido 120 (2019), curated by Something Must Break and Zoe De Luca, at Swan Station. An extreme residence where the human enters the natural world, and not the other way around (as we are used to).
M.B.H.: Something Must Break, a curatorial project that was concluded a few years ago, was representing the desire, mine and artist Michele Gabriele’s, to stage the most “melodramatic” and romantic part of the art and artists of our generation, and it does so through the immediacy and the power of the images; in this, it was is very similar to cinema. Starting from the title, the same as an independent queer Swedish movie, extremely full of yearning, we want to show the most emotional and immediate part of the artist’s work and the torments and joys that lead us to work every day on our obsessions.
What inspired us, in drafting an exhibition project, was a precise feeling, the need for a narrative that is much more layered than the composition of the artworks in a room: we desired those pieces to be our actors, our characters, capable of staging a story, almost a screenplay. But unlike cinema, we stage a truth, the truth of art itself. We see in the artwork’s subjects and not objects. There is endless love for the images and for the art language in this project, in my opinion; it’s like seeing the piece for the first time, recognizing it, and listening to what it would have meant to say for a long time, but which has never had the opportunity to tell.

E.S.: The other is Miranda, on display in a butcher’s shop. A work imbued with cultural and social meanings. I am interested in augian non-places, as a concept also applied to art. To the use of those other and altered spaces that create unexpected dialogues with the works.
M.B.H.: “Miranda” was my first solo show, at it was located in a butcher shop in Milan. Surprisingly, it reached a lot of publics, and many people still ask me about that project today. I remember that I was obsessed with the idea of ‘exploiting reality’ and using the environment that hosted the pieces as a medium, not just as the space in which they are displayed. In this way, reality became the main characteristic of the work. I was very young, but it still makes sense in my research path.

E.S.: Tell me about Monument to Vulnerability IV (Stoning of the Devil), exhibited at the EXPOSURE. Art, culture, fashion in and out of the showcase, at MUDEC in Milano. An exhibition that revolves around the showcase as a device (museum, commercial, etc.), and how you have also on this occasion broken through the walls on this occasion.
M.B.H.: Monument to Vulnerability IV (Stoning the Devil), 2024, is a piece conceived for a show that took place inside the ethnographic collection of MUDEC.
The exhibition, curated by Katya Inozemtseva and Sara Rizzo, reflects on the traditional concept of the vitrine and its centrality in exhibition projects. In relation to the ‘classical museum display’, the display case separates and at the same time exposes the object, offering it for viewing, but creating a barrier for the viewer. In ethnographic museums in particular, the ‘neutralizing’ effect of the display case affects the works, isolating them and depriving them of their original context and function.
Resonating on this concept, and the difficulty of being shown inside an ethnographic collection, it was natural for me to work on a site-specific neon work. This was the first time I was working with this material, and I was interested in the idea that it can hold the value of a statement, and that it uses language (proper speech) remaining anchored in the visual canons of art history. Like an archetype of an artwork, but with the potentiality of being a statement. It specifically addresses the audience of the Mudec collections, and it connects to the idea of artifact preservation and the very utopia of understanding the civilizations that came before us and were decimated by their contemporaries.
It claims to reconnect itself with history – with past and present events – through a ‘relic’ (the neon object), but also using a visual language linked to current activist gestures (varnish and food throwing on pieces of art and monuments).
The current geopolitical events lead me to resonate with the deep sterilization of meanings, and how the museum complex is an active part of the problem when the context desires the artifact, the relic, but does not embrace the history and humanity of which that object is permeated. Does the art object only acquire value after the accomplishment of historical disasters? How is it that we need the museum distance, (and its set-up, its showcases, its undercurrents) in order to ‘understand’ the preciousness of these objects, of the populations to which they belonged? Why do we feel that we can only understand history that has already disappeared?
And it is also a call to action. Not only feel empathy when the decimated populations are far away from us on the timeline, but it is an invitation to understand that history is not an abstract construct, but rather a coalition of different forces, one of which is asking for collective justice.
Working on an archetype, on a relic, is a way to see my practice from a different angle, but is still very related and linked strongly with the rest of my work corpus; it could be seen far colder than the rest of my research, but it was for me necessary: it reminds me to free from preconstructed ideas about what my work is, and the fact that, as an artist, I am free. I don’t need to formally resemble myself, I am myself, and I am my work.

E.S.: Let’s talk about painting. The pictorial gesture accompanies your work, but becomes the primary matrix in paintings rich in living matter, natural (spices, flowers), subject to a temporal process. Tempesta di sabbia (2022), and Blindness, Blossom and Desertification, (2024)
M.B.H.: Even if I always describe myself as a sculptor, I cyclically return to painting. It is a media that really fascinates me and that allows me to escape from my comfort zone. For now, I worked on two series of paintings. Sandstorm is a series made of five paintings, results of very quick gestures. These gestures propose a continuous confrontation with time, and, again, the possibility of reading the future on the materiality of that surface, like on the bottom of a teacup. The work has to remain buried under the spices for a period, with of course it is also related to a ritualistic way of working, more similar to a ceremony.
With the second series, Blindness, Blossom and Desertification I reached a more substantial mole of work, still ongoing, of twenty big-sized paintings that are more related to the idea of trying to understand from where the language of art derives. Formally, they are really like cave paintings, very dry, painted with powders throned on the cotton surface. I think that again here the concept is related to atavic urgencies. To how in my sculptural and installative works everything was screaming at me about the painting media.

E.S.: There are recurring elements in your work. Some of them are objective and concrete. I am thinking of the sculptures you create the installations with spices. Works that are part of an aesthetic-artistic discourse. Others are induced. Deductions, solicitations, ‘butterfly effects’, which act as a bridge between cultures (due to the influence of your mixed origins), which are the best opportunities not only to reflect on the nature of both, but to unhinge their paradigms. An awareness that leads you to think of your work also with a ‘political’ point of view. As if you activate (concretely or by generating thoughts), a possible transformation.
M.B.H.: Lately, I have been describing my work as a practice of reconciliation between the different polarities that comprise it. There are a lot of bridges, and so a lot of consolation too.

E.S.: What are you working on? What plans do you have for the future? I read that you have something in the works, for an upcoming exhibition at the Frac in Brittany. I am interested as I will be in that area soon.
M.B.H.: The show in Rennes at Frac Bretagne closed a few weeks ago, it was a group exhibition featuring a few artworks that are part of the Museum’s collection, and one piece from my series Aniconism as Figuration Urgency was visible.
I’m currently working on my biggest project so far, which will take place in October at MAXXI in Rome, in the contest of the MAXXI BVLGARI PRIZE IV; I have a full agenda for the next year, featuring shows in the Latvian Center of Contemporary Art (Riga), a solo show in Tunisia in the new space of Selma Feriani, as well at La Ferme du Buisson in France and at Museo Casa Rusca in Locarno among others. But what I am most excited about is my first upcoming monography curated by Gioia dal Molin, a project with which we won the Italian Council (2024): for sure this will be a new way of portraying my research.