For the Who am I? North African Narratives Q&A on the 17th June, our curator, Jessica El Mal interviewed artist Hannaa Hamdache as part of the Leeds International African Arts Festival
The LIAAF was established in 2023, with the aim of supporting multidisciplinary artists from the African Diaspora communities within West Yorkshire, through collaboration and co-creation opportunities. It was a natural partnership for The Arab British Centre, and our As We Are, Might Have Been, and Could Be, programme, in order to highlight the narratives of being from an Arab country in Africa, an identity which is sometimes overlooked or even taken for granted when thinking about the region.
From the shared experience of mixed heritage, the two discuss how food, family photography, and language become vessels of both cultural experience and exclusion, characterising the North African diaspora.
Read below for a transcript of the interview and to read more about Hannaa’s practice, including upcoming projects, visit here.
J: Thank you all for coming, my name is Jessica El Mal, I’m the curator at The Arab British Centre where I run an artist development programme called As We Are, Might Have Been, and Could Be and I first met Hannaa actually through my work running A.MAL Projects which is an art and research initiative between the UK and North Africa. I’ll let my panellist introduce herself shortly, but first I’d like to ask a question to the audience… what comes to mind when you think of North Africa?
[audience murmurs]
‘Arab Culture!’
‘The food – Lebanese food!’
J: Ok, interesting! Lebanon isn’t actually in North Africa [awkward laughs] but your answers are all really great, as they show that not much is really known about NA in the UK, right? Yes there are Arabs but we also have a lot of minority ethnic groups, other languages, not just deserts but also ski slopes, and that’s why I am really grateful to LIAAF for inviting us to have this panel today. While it is about North African narratives, I also want to acknowledge that between the two of us, me British-Moroccan, and Hannaa, it is a very Maghrebi focused panel, Maghrebi referring mostly to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, but North Africa also includes Sudan and Egypt. So without further ado, Hannaa would you like to introduce yourself for us please.
H: I’m here to represent Algeria today. I wear many hats, but today I’m wearing my artist hat. So my practice essentially explores my personal experience of the mixed experience, of being of mixed heritage, of being both Algerian and English and I explore that through various different mediums including films, food and photography.
J: So I also am of mixed heritage – I’m mixed Moroccan and British so we have that in common. So first I wanted to ask – you mentioned a little bit, some of the elements you draw on in your work like food and film, and there are different aspects of culture that hold a lot of memory and a lot of stories. So can you tell me which of these elements of culture you’re drawn to and why?
H: So primarily I was originally drawn to language as a key idea to explore – so this idea of linguistic inheritance. So unfortunately my Algerian Arabic is not very good, but that is my father tongue – which I think there’s something very interesting there about this idea of mother tongue and father tongue so it wasn’t necessarily passed down to me.
I think there’s lots of different reasons why that was – this idea of integration over preservation, wanting to make sure that our English was the best it could be. But then there’s also, you know, potentially other colonial aspects to it, so my own dad being comfortable in his Arabic, but actually he’s more comfortable in his French due to the French colonisation of Algeria when he was born. So I’m really interested in this idea of how we perform our identity sometimes, and just because you might not hold the linguistic knowledge it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re any less part of that community or that identity. It was also a very cathartic thing for me to do because I suppose personally I feel a lot of shame for not being able to, you know, properly communicate with my family in Algeria. So that was one of the key parts of culture that I wanted to explore.
And then also looking into food, I think food is such a great connector across cultures and countries, and I just loved this idea of bringing together elements that are, you know, part of British cuisine, but then spicing them up a little bit and making them Algerian. So, you know, scones that had raz al hanout in them. Something of a bit of a twist and bringing these different cultures that I hold very dearly to my heart together on one plate, and sharing that with other people and having those conversations and sharing that culture.
J: There’s another element that I’m really interested in in your work, the use of personal or family archives. Can you talk to me a little bit about that, or maybe give us an example of a project where you’ve used your personal archive?
H: So I have a project called the Al Jazeer Series, Al-Jazeer means Algeria, and it’s looking into family photographs. So scouring our family photos that have been taken in Algeria specifically, so from when my mum first went there in the 80s through to, you know, photos that I took a couple of months ago when I was there. So this idea of kind of a collective memory within my family and the relationship, we hold to that place. And also this idea of a shared authorship, because my view of Algeria is very much influenced by my family and the trips we used to have when we went there when I was younger, so I was really drawn to this idea of kind of our own personal photography.
J: And that’s I think a very common experience with many North African diasporas. If we’re lucky enough to get the chance to go home, the first thing our families will do is pull out the family album and look through photos and ‘this is your great great granddad’s mother son’ and etc. so it’s a very common experience. But something else which I think can happen a little bit when we’re in the diaspora is an over romanticization or over nostalgia-ising past, and especially these family photos because they are one of the only ways we can connect with our histories and with our cultures that we’re separated from geographically. But how do you either rectify or work with or play with that tension in your work? Is it something you’ve come across or thought about?
H: It’s something I’ve been thinking about a bit recently because originally with that photography project it was very much ‘do first and think later’- so I was drawn to this idea of creating these collages from the family photographs, and having that idea of shared authorship and patterns of place, and there is a nostalgia there because my relationship started with Algeria when I was young- I was fortunate enough to go during the six week summer holidays, so you know, it’s very much viewed through that lens. But recently I’ve been thinking about the danger of nostalgia, and also this idea of kind of exoticizing part of me, but I’m hoping- I have been reflecting on it a little bit- and I’m hoping that what I’m doing is more about sharing the culture and allowing people to learn more about particularly Algeria- at least from my lens. I’m very aware it’s a very personal individualised lens that I hold, but learning more about a country that Britain doesn’t really know potentially a lot about, because the French got there first, but I’m hoping that it’s a kind of a sharing and a knowledge exchange rather than an over-exoticisation.
J: Yeah, and that is something we have to think about where, you know, we had the Orientalism of the 18th 19th century. And now we’re kind of experiencing a re-orientalization of the diaspora, but I do think there’s something to be said about a collective experience- even just being aware of that in your work, like aware of the gaze, aware of positionality, I think really adds something to it. I think it would be great to learn a little bit more about your work with language. So you mentioned father tongue, and language is this intangible form of culture which especially with darija, which is the form of Arabic which is spoken particularly Morocco and Algeria, and it’s not actually a written language, so there is no dictionary, no agreed spelling, so it is something which is quite hard to archive or keep hold of. So can you maybe give us an example of one of your projects with language and why it’s important to you?
H: So Father Tongue was originally commissioned by Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, so it was part of the festival in 2022. Basically, it’s a moving image piece that incorporates spoken word, and it just focuses on my lips and I’m delivering a piece of poetry- very long form poetry that I’ve written in English, but the audio is actually in Algerian, it’s in darija. It was actually on show at Leeds Art Gallery when they had the Leeds Artist Show in 2023, which was very cool.
That was a really interesting process, because it was very much like therapy, writing this poem about what it feels like to not have the knowledge that you think you should have, or not be able to have the tools to speak with your family in their native tongue or with your community, and how it feels to kind of sit between that, but not being any less part of that identity because you can’t perform it as people might expect. But it was really key that that was spoken in a tongue that I should have inherited in another parallel universe, so it was really interesting to do a call out on Instagram, and I managed to actually find somebody from Oran- there’s a group of them, they did the translation and she did the recording of the voice I never had but I should have had. So that was really interesting and I was very specific that it needed to be in darija- there was an open call out, so hearing her speak I was like, this is the right one, and I didn’t even realise she was from Oran- which is where my family’s from- so that was a really interesting process.
J: It reminds me a little bit of the work of Mona Hatoum, who is a Lebanese artist, and she did a film project where she had three screens and in the in all three screens there were women washing dishes and in the first screen, it was her and her mum washing dishes, and speaking to each other in Arabic. Then the dishes passed to the next screen, where it was her and her daughter, but in France, and she was trying to speak French to her daughter and it was about the breakages within the passing down of language that happens when we do migrate and integrate as you say. I think there’s something also in North Africa, and Arab traditions, and also in Imazighen traditions, which are the indigenous communities of North Africa, about orality and the importance of telling spoken stories, probably particularly because the language is not a written one. Do you feel like that influenced your interest in having someone actually speak the words and record the words out loud?
H: Yeah, definitely, I think when I think of family gatherings in Algeria, you know they’re very noisy, they’re very loud, there’s lots of laughing, there’s lots of stories- sounds potentially like they’re shouting each other, but they’re not, they’re just having a really good time. So I definitely think that that’s very inherent, at least in my experience and within my family in Algeria. And also there was a feeling of not being able to fully participate, you know I love language and I love my mastery of the English language but unfortunately I’ll never have that in Darija. So there was that kind of feeling of being part of it but also not being part of it- so it was a lot of emotion and to express and explore.
J: Yeah, there is. You mentioned that the piece was shown in Liverpool and also here in Leeds. How did you find the reception in, you know, the North of England where there’s not necessarily so much representation of our communities. Did you find that there was a North African Community, which was resonating with the work? Did you find a different community was also resonating with it? How was that for you?
H: So I think, particularly in Liverpool, I had the opportunity to do a workshop, so I did a workshop for people that had lived experience of two or more cultures. It was a poetry workshop and it was a really beautiful space because you don’t have to explain anything, there was a lot of unspoken understanding of what it means to come from multiple cultures. So it felt like it really resonated with those individuals who also held that mixed experience.
J: So, is poetry something that you’re going to use in your work?
H: I did Fine Art at uni because I was greedy- that’s what I said because I couldn’t decide on a discipline, but for that piece in particular, I needed to use poetry to do it. It’s something I’m interested in exploring again, but yeah, I’m very grateful that Liverpool Arab Art Festival just were like ‘yeah, sure’
J: Well, that is what’s great about LAAF, actually. So I think this moves us on to another aspect of your work which you mentioned, food. So here on the screen, we have an image.. that’s Hannaa at the back when you came to do an Eating the Archive with A.Mal projects. Do you want to talk us through a little bit about what the audience is seeing in this picture and what your idea was?
H: Yeah sure. So we might all be familiar with those equal opportunity forms that you get asked to fill out and I always hate them because I always have to tick ‘mixed-other’. My mixture is not containable within one of the categories, and I just think that’s a really weird phrase, like ‘mixed-other’ that it makes me sound like some pick and mix sweets or something- it’s weird.
Anyway, I wanted to use this idea of ‘mixed-other’, what does that potentially look like if it was food on a plate, and Jessica was really nice to invite me to host this dinner with artists during this residency and it was thinking about how can I play with food, to kind of spark conversation or share that culture and share that moment together? So it was really fun to kind of bring different dishes that I’m very familiar with in Algeria to things we have there in the UK. So, you know, playing with the idea of scones, but making them a little bit different, shoving olives in them and raz al hanout, but then having a little spiced clotted cream, and ending the whole thing with a mint tea, which is a classic thing to do, at least in our areas of North Africa. And it was just a really beautiful day and a beautiful way to kind of facilitate that conversation and share that culture and share that moment together. And yeah, I really enjoyed it.
J: So the idea behind Eating the Archives is to allow artists the space to work with food and use food to preserve something which might otherwise be lost. So, for example, here, we’re thinking about language, we’re thinking about integration and mixed cultures, we also have had events that are focussed around foods which are threatened to be extinct because of climate change, or foods which are not accessible because of war. And it’s really interesting, actually, to think of food in a creative way, because in our area of the world, and in many others, sharing a communal meal is really the whole focus of the day. You run home from school, your parents have a three-hour lunch break, just so that you can eat lunch together and have that communal meal and talk and get to know each other. Is that something which you have found really important within your work and your practise? How do you find being here in Leeds and the food culture- is there space to be creative with food as we might be back home?
H: I have held a version of this for friends which was really fun, to kind of develop that idea a little bit further and play with that and have that space safe space for discussion. I will say the food in Leeds is really, really good- I’m in love with the market, particularly the chargrilled mackerel sandwich, just going to plug that here if you do eat fish. But there’s just such vibrant communities here in Leeds, from all different kinds of backgrounds, and I think one thing Leeds does really well is foster that creativity.
J: That’s really nice to hear. My next question is veering off a little bit from these forms of culture to think about an emerging sort of technology- how have you found technology? Has it impacted your work? Or just the experience of being in the diaspora being in the North African diaspora more generally, have you noticed it has an impact on creativity or connection at all?
H: I think this is going to be a very basic answer, but when I was younger we would always go to Algeria for the six weeks holidays. And there was never an easy way to share that back with friends at home or people I knew. Whereas now we all have cameras on our phones, so it’s really nice, as simple as it is, to be able to share experiences or things I’ve seen through Instagram and kind of treating that like my digital sketchbook, but then also having the medium of film to be able to play around a little bit, so every time I’m there I’m always collecting different clips of moments that seem interesting but I’m not sure yet how they’re interesting, and I want to spend some time now to kind of thread those together into something that other people can access.
J: Amazing, and that actually leads us quite nicely into the last question from me, which is what is next for you? Do you have any projects in the pipeline? What are you working on currently?
H: So at the moment, it’s looking at all the fodder that I’ve collected from travels and how can I bring that together into a coherent piece. But then also continuing my research into patterns of place, so that’s kind of what I’ve been exploring through those digital collages- this idea of how different places have very distinctive colours and textures and shapes and forms, you know you’ll see something and it will transport you to somewhere else. Doing that more so within my Algerian side but then also I think it would be quite complementary to do that within my British side as well, my English side. In particular where my mum is from in Lincoln, so kind of exploring how those can both sit together.
J: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Thank you, so now we just have a little bit of time for questions from the audience. If anyone has a question for either Hannah or I, now is your time to speak or forever hold your peace.
H: We can happily slink away
J: All right. Well then I would just like to ask everyone to give Hannaa a really big round of applause. Thank you so much for being here, thank you to the festival for having us. If you are interested in North African and Arab cultures, the Arab British Centre has a film festival called Safar Film Festival and we have two or three films in Leeds this year- I think at Hyde Park Picture House, so do check that out. We have some great Palestinian films on and yeah, thank you so much for having us.
H: Thank you Jessica!
Hannaa Hamdache is a British-Algerian artist and curator. Her practice explores play, recontextualizing the everyday, while using humour and education to make art accessible. Currently, she investigates personal heritage through archives, film, and food, with exhibitions at New Art Exchange, Leeds Art Gallery, and others. A member of UK New Artists’ Creative Thinktank, her curatorial projects include Glasgow’s ‘City Centre Contemporary Art Trail’ (2019/20) and GoMA’s ‘The Voice of the Museum’ (2018).