Map of Bodies and Intimacies (2025)

Interface
Epson Enhanced Matte 189gsm prints Phone Screens
Sound


Commissioned by the Royal Academy of the Arts, the Map of Bodies and Intimacies is a digital map interface and multimedia installation that challenges the fundamentally extractive process of digital mapping. In this digital environment, the aim is to locate the feelings, intimacies and mourning rituals of the people of South Jeddah, who through their digital memory work commemorated their changing urban landscapes through digital documentation footage and HDRI environments. The pinned coordinates in this map enact a refusal of optimisation logic, instead they invite viewers to witness and sit with the grief, ritual and testimony of South Jeddah’s residents. The audience is invited to “touch and linger”, but not to capture. The map's inherent failure to provide a neat, complete narrative of south Jeddah’s changed landscape is its most imaginative quality.

The digital map here is a repertoire that sits with embodied knowledge and lived experience. It holds gestures, sounds, and affects that enact "disorderly lingerings" on grief and memory. The map documents how people moved through and felt about the neighborhoods, archiving the "lingering actions" of bodies in motion.

Exhibition publication can be found [here]

Interface View:







To view layered map exceprts click [here]

Installation view:








Interaction:








Activation:
In conversation with Nouf Alhimiary and Delaine LaBas.