Perhaps I have an undiscovered sixth sense for sniffing out great arts festivals or perhaps Tunis is just one of those cities where there’s always something interesting going on but either way, it just so happened that my visit to the capital coincided with the 8th edition of Tunis’ biennial arts festival, Dream City.
Many of the festival’s installations were housed in Caserne El Attarine, a former library where video installations were to be found in most rooms as well as a lively café and meeting area in the foyer. Far from being just a location, Caserne El Attarine played a key role in the exhibition, with half of the downstairs area restored to its former literary glory, showcasing its selection of beautiful antique books.
The films upstairs included Gabriela Colder’s brilliantly subtle and subversive ‘Conversation Piece’, a film of two young girls sweetly reading the Communist Manifesto to their grandmother, pausing every few paragraphs so that she could explain to them the meaning of words like ‘comrade’ and ‘proletariat’.
Downstairs were a series of long form interviews by Manthia Diawara with intellectuals including Edouard Glissant (‘One World in Relation’) and Angela Davis (‘A World of Greater Freedom’). I visited on the first day and was so gripped by their words that I stayed until closing time.
Dream City’s installations are scattered around the old medina in such a way that they force you to explore, to wander around the alleyways and backstreets, never knowing which unsuspecting building could be home to one of the festival’s many treasures.
On my second visit, I decided to embrace the festival’s commitment to making sure its visitors get lost (something I usually don’t need any help with). Within a few streets I stumbled upon a free exhibition entitled ‘Return’ which told the story of artist Michael Rakowitz’s project to import Iraqi dates to the US, for the first time in over 25 years, and to open a shop selling Iraqi products in New York with their origin clearly stated on the packaging. A film told the story of his struggle to get the dates across various borders, incidentally mirroring the plight of Iraqi refugees attempting to reach safety. The exhibits gave more information about the cultural significance of dates in Iraq and beyond and there was even complimentary date coffee on offer.
Perhaps the best (not to mention most timely) of the exhibits that I visited was Palestinian artist Basel Zaraa’s ‘Dear Leila’, an interactive experience where visitors enter a small room one at a time and are told through a series of letters, casettes and momentos, Zaraa’s family history before they were forced to leave Palestine. The visitor sits before the artist’s model of his family home and is cast in the role of his inquisitive five-year-old daughter to whom he is explaining how and why the family left their homeland, a touching and poetic piece of art.
I would have liked to have made it to a few more of the festival’s exhibitions and events, which included live music most evenings of the festival’s two week duration, but time flies in Tunis and those exhibitions which I did manage to see were worth more than a quick skim in favour of rushing off to another installation. In any case, the festival is the perfect excuse to be back in Tunis in 2025, and 2027, and 2029…
