Siwa plateforme - L'Economat at Redeyef

Conceived as a nomadic program for exchange between artists and thinkers from Tunis, Tunisia, Baghdad, Iraq, and Paris, France, Siwa platforme has taken root in the mountainous region of Gafsa, Tunisia. Redeyef, in one of the world’s largest phosphate basins, remains one of the most marginalized towns in Tunisia. Its inhabitants are mainly miners and unemployed youth, with a strong trade unionist tradition. Precarious living conditions contributed to a spirit of revolt that gained momentum in 2008, anticipating the worldwide uprisings of 2011....

Since 2011 the group, composed of Yagoutha Belgacem, Arafat Sadallah, Jean-Pierre Han, and Chems Zitouni, has worked with artists from France and Tunisia, and the inhabitants of Redeyef. Through a collaborative renovation of L’Économat, the mining settlement’s colonial general warehouse, they turned it into a laboratory for activities, breathing life into possible common futures. Through a collective proposal of interventions, installations, images, drawings, and performances, their work for documenta fifteen bridges the Fridericianum and the Économat in Redeyef.

Haythem Zakaria’s installation draws a topography of the luminous desert landscape, while Mohammed Znaidi tells stories of the desert. Radio transmitters broadcast recordings of inhabitants of Redeyef narrating a scorching desire to burn national borders. In the sound installation Nantes – Redeyef (2022), Guellaa, a rapper from the region, recounts his perilous journey over the Mediterranean to France. While the musician Loup Uberto records and transfigures the traditions of song and poetry from Redeyef, Okacha Ben Salah, a young filmmaker, paints a filmic portrait of the town. Yagoutha Belgacem and Marianne Dautrey propose a visual montage of the archives of the ten years of Siwa in Redeyef and make audible the voice of the choreographer-dancer Imen Smaoui, who speaks of the freedom of the bodies of the people of Redeyef and their relationship to the space of the desert.

[Quelle: https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/lumbung-members-artists/siwa-plateforme-leconomat-at-redeyef/]