# Global Heshmat

- **Years:** 2026
- **Methods:** Svelte 5, SvelteKit, TypeScript, MapLibre GL, WebGL, Interactive mapping, Prosopography, Data visualisation
- **Web page:** https://www.frederickmadore.com/digital-humanities/global-heshmat

*An interactive map and archive following the public artworks of the Egyptian sculptor Hassan Heshmat across ten countries, and the people who shaped his career. Developed for the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO).*

[Global Heshmat](https://heshmat.zmo.de/) follows the Egyptian sculptor **Hassan Heshmat** (1920–2006) and his artworks in public spaces around the world. It is a team project of the [Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)](https://www.zmo.de/en) in Berlin; I developed the website.

Heshmat was an internationally celebrated artist committed to the idea of "Art for All" (*Kunst für alle*). After training as a sculptor in Cairo, he travelled to Selb in Bavaria on a DAAD scholarship in 1957 to study porcelain, a medium that let him cast affordable multiples for a wide public. His monuments, reliefs and sculptures still stand in parks, museums and squares across several countries, and in 2000 he received Egypt's State Appreciation Award.

## What you can explore

The site gathers 40 works and sites, most of them in Egypt and others across Europe, the United States and China. Twenty-six are located; the other 14 are documented but not yet found. A "to be found" filter turns those gaps into an open call: visitors who recognise a Heshmat work in a public space are invited to report it.

- **Map**: the works clustered by place, alongside the homes he lived in, with a dashed line tracing any work that has moved from its former site
- **Collection**: 156 photographs, browsable as a gallery or a list, with a fieldbook for saving works and an export
- **People**: 31 profiles from Sonja Hegasy's research into the sponsors, curators, collectors and friends around Heshmat. Mapping them has already revealed a cluster that had gone unnoticed: his ties to the Armenian community in Cairo
- **Detail pages** with images, sources and video, each with its own web address for sharing

## How it's built

Global Heshmat is a static [SvelteKit](https://svelte.dev/) site (Svelte 5 runes, TypeScript) with the map rendered by [MapLibre GL JS](https://maplibre.org/) over vector tiles. Each artwork and each person lives in its own typed data file that is discovered at build time, so adding a new entry is a one-file edit. Metadata on every page makes each work easy to share and to find in search engines, and the interface works on any screen size and from the keyboard.

## Credits

Global Heshmat is a collaborative project of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO):

- **Concept**: [Dr Sonja Hegasy](https://www.zmo.de/en/people/dr-sonja-hegasy)
- **Configuration**: Jan Purtzel
- **Development**: Frédérick Madore
- **Contributor**: Samar Heshmat

The site complements ZMO's [audiovisual exhibition on Hassan Heshmat](https://www.zmo.de/en/knowledgetransfer/h-heshmat-digital).

## Addresses

- [heshmat.zmo.de](https://heshmat.zmo.de/)
- [Global-Heshmat](https://github.com/ZMO-Berlin/Global-Heshmat)

## Embedded views

- [The map](https://heshmat.zmo.de/): The 26 located works, the 14 still to be found and the places Heshmat lived. Filter by country, status or type, search works, places and people, and select a marker for its images, metadata and sources.