Tunisian-Italian artist Monia Ben Hamouda’s work navigates and confronts her generational Muslim heritage through what she calls a shamanic process, creating works that act as gestural exorcisms of the expectations placed upon her by tradition and the politicized present. The draw their power from the urgency of expression. Her visual language is steeped in cultural-religious symbology and rituals. The large-scale paintings pertaining to the series Blindness, Blossom and Desertification explore the narrative construction of art history and articulate the links between architecture, physical and spiritual protection, sacred imagery, and spaces. Produced in Tunisia using soil gathered from different regions of the country, painted by the force of spices thrown onto the canvas, and grounded in soil and clay, the works operate at the intersection of love and sacrifice, crisis and fragmentation, and ancestral memory. The pieces evoke the familiar imprint of a homeland’s soil, alluding to archaeological sites and excavations in both theme and visual form. The paintings are split across two canvases, with the demarcated crack serving as a critical symbol. It mirrors Ben Hamouda’s own experience of divide across two lands, while also eliciting modern-day politics surrounding the destruction of ancestral grounds.