Grandmother University
Isabella Hammad
a reading and conversation with the author
21. September 2025
19.00-21.00
19.00-21.00
Save the Date
For free
all ages welcome
in English
Haneen once compared Palestine to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath. She probably didn’t say that exactly, but that was the image she had brought into my mind. That this place revealed something about the whole world.
— Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost
Spore Initiative is pleased to host acclaimed author Isabella Hammad for a public reading, followed by a conversation with artist Jumana Manna.
Drawing from her recent writings, Hammad turns to the urgencies of narrative in the present: the entanglement of literature and politics, the tensions of distance and proximity in witnessing, and the responsibilities of the artist and the intellectual in times of upheaval. Across her work, she asks how words can endure when faced with erasure, how memory is held under conditions of violence, and what it means to speak — or remain silent — in the midst of catastrophe.
Hammad’s words from Enter Ghost are part of Spore’s current exhibition, 'aʿmāl al-'arḍ – Landworks, Collective Action and Sound —a multi‑chapter exploration of how artistic practice becomes an act of persistence, rooted in land, memory, and collective care, unfolding through gestures of remembrance and resistance.
Isabella Hammad
Jumana Manna
