Exhibition: Place as Memory, Experience and Practice

 For the Autumn 2025 semester, Hisham Bustani, a visiting researcher at Sciences Po - CERI, led a course entitled Dynamics of Postcolonial Arab Cities: Place as Memory, Experience, and Practice at Sciences Po’s Paris Campus. Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course integrated academic research with literary and artistic practices to develop critical perspectives on political, social, and urban transformation in the Arab region.

Students first examined precolonial societies, their regional interactions, and communal modes of living. The course then traced the impact of colonialism, border drawing, and postcolonial identity formation on contemporary cities, highlighting experiences of identity questioning, alienation, and conflict. It also addressed how authoritarianism, neoliberalism, commodification, and consumerism have shaped—and at times distorted—urban development.

For their final project, students created city-memory narratives. Drawing on personal, family, or community archives and objects, each produced an exhibition piece accompanied by a research-based text connecting their material to broader urban and social themes explored in class. Projects took diverse forms, including essays, photographs, videos, sound works, installations, and infographics, with research as a central component.

This exhibition presents a selection of these works. Though rooted in personal experience, they link individual stories to wider community, regional, and global contexts. Together, they show how personal experiences and urban life are shaped by intertwined histories and forces—connecting past and present, intimate and collective, local and global—within a complex web. The 2,000-word article written by the students to further contextualize the work, bringing art and research into dialogue, can be accessed through the link below.

Curator: Hisham BUSTANI

Participating students: Mariafé BARRANTES, Lia BEN NUN, Peter Andre CARRIEDO, Agostino DAVINI JOHNSON, Sofia DEWEY, Kanzy IBRAHIM,  Alice MASON, Yu-Ting PENG, Ollie PRENTISS, Carlos Alejandro ROBLEDO, Tom Peter SCHWARTE

Curatorial assistance: Tom Peter SCHWARTE

Printing: Olivier AOUAT