Moving Bodies in the Streets of the Heart of Tunis

As editors, we arrived at this contribution by Mustapha Bentaleb and Joachim Ben Yakoub somewhat like latecomers to a gathering, where a conversation is already unfolding, photographs are being passed around, and old songs still linger in the air. What we encountered was not a linear narrative, but a constellation of memories, documents, names, and voices—partially preserved, partially reconstructed. The setting is a contemporary collective workspace in Brussels, known as The Kitchen. There, the authors imagine a gathering with members of the former cultural-political group Ahl el Hijra, sharing yellowing photo- graphs, leafing through copies of Tribune Immigrée, and reflecting on acts of resistance from early 1980s Belgium. This layered return—across time, media, and memory— invites us to consider not only what remains of these histo- ries, but how we reassemble their fragments in the present. At the heart of the story is Schaerbeek, a working-class district in Brussels where many Maghrebi workers settled following the 1964 labor agreement between Belgium and Morocco. In 1982, under Mayor Roger Nols, immigrant residents were systematically excluded from the municipal registry—cut off from basic social rights such as legal recognition, welfare, and access to schooling. In response, Ahl el Hijra launched a series of actions: a hunger strike, public gatherings, and a collectively built exhibition titled What’s Happening in Schaerbeek?. This contribution returns to that moment, by allowing fragments to speak. Archival photographs, interviews with a former member of Ahl el Hijra, pages from Tribune Immigrée (Issue 4, Feb.–Apr. 1982), and the protest song His Imprisoned Shadow converge to form a scattered composition ... What follows is not a definitive account, but a listening position, attuned to what surfaces when the past is reopened in the present. Taous Dahmani & Tom Viaene

For Radio Fantôme, during the closing chapter of Border Buda, 'The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet' ,Kitchen Broadcast aired a live programme, drawing from a series of closed listening sessions amongst friends, introducing excerpts from Radio El Wafa (The Trustworthy) and Sawt al Muhajir (The Voice of the Migrant), two radios founded in Brussels in the 1980s when there was an explosion of pirate radios in the city. The live broadcast, with guests Mustapha Bentaleb, Rachida Lamrabet and Mustapha Bandini, explores possible ways to re-distribute solidarities activated among the then still free radio stations. These sessions are part of the research project re:Sol, Redistributing Solidarities by Joachim Ben Yakoub and Reem Shilleh at slarg.be borderbuda.be/  

With The Circle, Khalili continues to reinvent theatrical languages through cinema. She articulates montage and mise-en-scene as means of Brechtian distance-effects renewing her own filmic language in dialogue with performance: as much theatrical as rooted in the Maghrebi tradition. For The Circle, Bouchra Khalili delves into the power of performance as a cinematographic device, with two core moments. First, through the performance of a hunger strike, where the damned of the earth recourse to their body as ultimate weapon of protest against dehumanization: ready to “pay with their blood, with their lives, so they don’t have to pay with their humanity”, as stated in the theatre play One Works, Works and Shuts Up by Al Assifa. During these historical hunger strikes, the damned emerged from what Frantz Fanon called the zones of non-being, to appear in full daylight. Second, through Djellali Kamal, the presidential candidate rising out of the hunger strike. A performative pseudonym rendering the struggle out of damnation visible through a common name, as well as invoking a presence marked by two haunting absences.

In January 2016, the first President of post-revolutionary Tunisia, Beji Caid Essebsi addressed the people, from exact the same setting as former president Habib Bourguiba’s in January 1984’s speech to contain popular revolts. In the proposed book chapter, I venture into the power dynamics proper to the constitution and reconstitution of state aesthetics in the process of monumental re-bourguibization. As the appropriation of spectacular power in different cities over Tunisia such as Sousse, Monastir or Tunis, was met with new waves of artistic resistance, my contribution to the book takes notice of the often-overseen processes through which aesthetic agency was temporarily halted by the re-emergence of new forms of authoritarian symbolic politics during the post-revolutionary phase. Based on a long-term participant observation in the field of visual arts in Tunisia between 2011 and 2017 and combining insights from aesthetic theory and various postcolonial critiques, I show how monumental aesthetics are not structured overnight. Looking into the formation of spectacular power in the longue durée, I argue that the thousand eyes that constitute contested monumental aesthetics in Tunisia are historical constructions, characterized by a palimpsestic structure that reveal its postcolonial disposition. This historically detour helps to untie the present apparent contradictions proper to the ambiguous processes of monumental de-bourguibization and re-bourguibization. Through the self-conscious, ostentatious, and aesthetic gesture of over-writing one symbolic order by another, the site of former colonial and postcolonial power is marked with at times opposing narratives and counter narratives of national becoming, forming a renewed, multilayered but contested site of postcolonial spectacular power. Published in the volume Art Against Authoritarianism in Southwest Asia and North Africa, edited by Tijen Tunali and Josepha Ivanka Wessels (I.B. Tauris, 2025

Reconsidering the figuration of the storyteller as hlayqi·a, we propose a meditation in two stories on ways of breathing out of the university, and into many schools, allowing for the re-activating of translocal non-aligned pedagogies of liberation to come to the fore. Through two different stories, two different lived experiences relating with the at times frivolous movements and ga(s)ping resonances of the wind, we re-conceive our precarious affiliation with the university to unlearn and relearn forms of knowing, sensing and being in a pluriversality. By bringing two different lived experiences together in one meditation, we hope to move with and be moved by momentary confluences of different winds, blowing from dissimilar and at times antagonizing spaces, times and histories to abolish hegemonic forms of knowledge production, pedagogies and histories proper to the university. By doing so, this recalcitrant meditation will hold space for the articulation of a plurality of possible worlds to come. In Performance Research, 28(8), 109–119

First Waves is a collaborative open platform that proposes to share the often-silenced stories of the struggles for dignity of the Maghrebi and Black diasporas in Belgium. Rendering visible the early waves that reveal and erode persistent racialized and colonial structures. By collaborating with the witnesses and protagonists of these first waves, the platform gathers memories, recorded testimonies and archival materials washed ashore, spanning from the colonial era to the dawn of the new millennium. This effort aspires to initiate a transformative ebb and flow of memorial restitution, repairing and honoring memories shaped by the waves of antiracist struggles that precede us. These constitutive waves, overflowing the shores of time, from eternity to eternity, continue to move the undercurrent of the present, sedimenting the enduring impact of historical contempt and eroding different pathways towards a shared dignified horizon.· “Another wave overcomes the first and fulminates. Sparkling and streaming with new life. Without number, overflowing the shores of time, from eternity to eternity, other waves are born and die, covering and renewing themselves, adding their life to life. From as far away as we can hear them, they all have the same voice, repeating the same word: peace, peace, peace...” Driss Chraibi, La Civilisation ma mère, 1988, pp 14 ==> www.firstwaves.be

This contribution operates a bit differently from others in this issue. This is true for its format, but more importantly, because it centers the diasporic political struggles of groups (Maghrebi, and more particularly Moroccan) whose familial histories are not directly related to the colonial history of the concerned European state (in this case, Belgium) – a similar contribution should therefore be made in the future centering this time the Congolese, Rwandan, and Burundian diasporas. Moroccans (in particular Rifans), Algerians, and Tunisians form a large part of the racialized working class in Belgium since the 1960s, and have organized politically to resist the various forms of racial capitalist exploitation and police violence. Mustapha Bentaleb, who has a first-hand experience of these struggles, and Joachim Ben Yakoub use six archival documents from the 1970s to recount the various forms this political organizing has taken. Leopold Lambert, Funambulist #54 July-Aug 2024 Colonial Continuums

33 jaar na de opstanden van Vorst komen we samen rond de collectieve publicatie 'FEU2FORÊT. A song of dignity? Dit boek wil de verhalen doorgeven die werden verteld tijdens de tentoonstelling FEU2FORÊT die plaatsvond in november 2021. De publicatie verweeft verschillende beelden, tekeningen, video's, performances en installaties die tijdens de tentoonstelling te zien waren en bevat teksten van onder andere Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Marielle Pelissero, Olivier Marboeuf en Sofia Dati. Visuele elementen worden gecombineerd met narratieve en reflectieve draden, samen met het verzamelde archiefmateriaal. Door het smeulende vuur van 1991 nieuw leven in te blazen, hoopt de publicatie meer inzicht te geven aan de vonken die uit verschillende Brusselse wijken vlogen, en blijvende uitdagingen te confronteren. 

In It is like a Finger Pointing a Way to the Moon Moya Michael is searching for the movement of different unyielding languages. After the celebrated Coloured Swan trilogy and Outwalkers, choreographer Moya Michael proposes to dance nearby the guardians of words, movements, and rhythms she encountered in South-Africa and Namibia.  Drawing inspiration from Bruce Lee’s famous line in Enter the Dragon—“Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!”—Moya Michael sets out to explore the worlds of words, movements, and rhythms she encountered in South Africa and Namibia. After spending time with !Amace, Be, and their Ju/'Hoansi family, she joins forces with artists Victoire Karera Kampire, Simon Thierrée, and Joachim Ben Yakoub. Through the precise use of image, movement, and sound, a liminal space of ongoing transformation is created, inviting reflection on oral tradition and survival. Together, they delve into the movement within different unyielding languages. Guided by Bruce Lee’s allusion to an old Zen Buddhist wisdom in his seminal film Enter the Dragon, “Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!”, she proposes to move with what we cannot fathom. To disappear in order to preserve the words that precede us, that never left us. To transform in order to keep what came before us.   CREATION Moya Michael IN COLLABORATION WITH Victoire Karera Kampire, Simon Thierrée, Joachim Ben Yakoub SCENOGRAPHY Špela Tušar COSTUME DESIGN Andrea Kränzlin VIDEO Victoire Karera Kampire SOUND DESIGN Simon Thierée LIGHT DESIGN & DIRECTION Ellie Bryce SOUND Patrick Van Neck DRAMATURGY Joachim Ben Yakoub STAGE MANAGER Caroline Wagner PRODUCTION MANAGER Lise Bruynseels  DISTRIBUTION Cecilia Kuska PRODUCTION KVS COPRODUCTION WIELS, Perpodium, Bergen Kunsthall       

For the fourth episode of Kitchen Broadcast, we had lunch with Bojana Cvejic and Yazan Khalil and took the time to talk and exchange ideas about the infrastructural conditions and ways of hosting, (under)commoning and insituting otherwise, starting from both their practices in setting up different spaces and places. Bojana Cvejić is on of the co-founders, together with Jan Ritsema and still an active member of PAF (Performing Arts Platform)a residency in a small villange St Erme in France close to the Belgian border. She is also, among many other things, active in TkH (Walking Theory platform) an independent, institutionally non-aligned, extra-academic platform for performing theoretical-artistic activism. Yazan Khalili engaged in the transformation of Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in between 2015 and 2019 in Ramallah, Palestine, and continued his reflections on processes of instituting through different projects, among many other things, the QAF or the Question of Funding and Aka, a space hosting a decentralized network of self-organizing and grassroots collectives in Kassel. Kitchen Broadcast is an ongoing online conversation that proposes to listen to different voices, different rhythms and different sounds, reflecting on present situations that intersect in Brussels, composed by Joachim Ben Yakoub and Reem Shilleh. It is produced with the kind support of Kaaitheater, a stage for dance, theater, performance, music and debate in Brussels.

EXÓTICA presents itself as a ritual invocation conceived as a séance and a celebration of ancestral relational worlds. By hosting the re-appearance of four different glamorous but dispossessed artists active in the 1920’s on Europe- an stages, the prevalent conception of dance as a formal composition of movement, always already translated into an aesthetic object for distant observation is profoundly broken.

For this episode of Kitchen Broadcast we sat together with Iswanto Hartono from Ruangrupa, Reinaart Vanhoe from Ook_collectif, Noemie from El Warcha, Mohanad Yakubi and Reem Shilleh from Subversive film and the Kitchen, Noor Abed artist and curatorial assistent for documenta fifteen and Joachim Ben Yakoub from the Kitchen. Together we took the time to reflect on the question ‘How to share the practice of Lumbung?’. For documenta fifteen ruangrupa introduced lumbung as a practice, not only during but also leading up to and beyond the 100 days of the exhibition. After they were invited to be the artistic direction of documenta fifteen, the collective, in turn, invited documenta to be part of its ekosistem. The practice of lumbung enables an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution. It is anchored in the local and based on values such as humour, generosity, independence, transparency, sufficiency, and regeneration.

A conversation with Rabih Mroué, in the frame of 'Images Mon Amour, his solo exhibition at Extra City, Antwerp (26.11.22 — 16.04.23).

Review of Rolando Vazquez his book 'Vistas of Modernity. Decolonials Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary. Essay 014. Amsterdam: Mondriaan Fund, 2020, 182p

Dans ce chapitre, les auteurs restituent la politique européenne en matière d’identité culturelle juvénile et font émerger une lecture contrapunctique formulée par les collectifs de terrain à l’encontre de la gentrification. Le chapitre questionne notamment en quoi les institutions européennes sont à l’origine d’une construction normative de l’identité juvénile, et comment les jeunes des quartiers construisent, à leur tour, des revendications contestant le contenu définitionnel d’une Europe des institutions. Publier dans le livre Are we Europe? Religion, identité et mobilité : étude de cas marocains et turcs, sous la direction de Farid El Asri et Maryam Kolly (Bruxelles: Presse Saint Louis, 2022, pp. 249-282)

Using the epistolary form, Joachim Ben Yakoub and Baobab van de Teranga write to us from the perspective of the Brussels racialized youth that revolted on May 10-12, 1991 in Forest. This uprising remains a fundamental event in the struggle against structural racism and police violence in Belgium and, as such, can influence analog ongoing fights in Europe and elsewhere. This letter was written as an exercise in critical fabulation and quantum love. It is part of FEU2FORET, a collective endeavor bringing together a number of artists to reimagine thirty years of revolt in Brussels through different burning aesthetics. It is based on archival work by Naima M. And with boundless gratitude to Najib Chairi and the Artistory Collective for the inspiring collaboration.   Co-authored with Baobab van de Teranga for the Funambulist (44)

Bouchra Khalili in Conversation with Joachim Ben Yakoub. With an introduction by Joachim Ben Yakoub. The full conversation is available in the book Bouchra Khalili (2022) Stories Within Stories. Berlin: Hatje Cantz. you can order here Bouchra Khalili works across film, video, installation, photography, printmaking and editorial platforms. Originating from long and extended research, her interdisciplinary practice examines imperial and colonial continuums as epitomized by contemporary forced illegal migrations and the suppressed memory of anti-colonial struggles and international solidarity. Deeply informed by the legacy of post-independence avant-gardes and vernacular traditions from her native Morocco, Khalili’s methodology develops strategies of storytelling at the intersection of history and micro-narratives. She suggests a meditation on the power of civil poetry as defined by Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and as practiced for centuries in Al-Halqa, Morocco’s oldest tradition of public storytelling. The works in Stories Within Stories bring together singular positions articulating collective voices for rethinking emancipatory forms of citizenship, resistance and solidarity. The various contributions in this book investigate Khalili’s original techniques of storytelling inviting us to experiment with new forms of civic imagination.

The spatial dynamics were difficult to overlook during the 2011 movements of revolt in Tunisia, pushing the damned in the center of public attention in the concerted effort of turning prevailing authoritarian politics inside–out. Venturing in the spatial contestation central in these revolts, the mesmerizing occupation and re-appropriation of symbolic places, such as the Kasbah Square or Bourguiba Avenue took center stage. These movements of occupation and re-appropriation of spatial power produced momentous heuristic enclaves of another order, projecting dreams of a renewed inclusive free and dignified body politic. Based on a long-term research in the field of visual arts in Tunisia between 2011 and 2017 and the combination of various postcolonial critiques, this article demonstrates the way in which violent processes of destruction preceding these processes of re-appropriation and occupation are too often overlooked. Police stations, the presidential personality cult and the private estate of the authoritarian regime are identified and treated as spatial nodes that maintain the compartmentalization and fragmentation of urban space in place. Moreover, by including in the analysis the often-omitted Islamist occupation and re- appropriation of mosques and public space contesting the ongoing constitutional political dynamics, this article elucidates why the revolutionary process failed in the production of a long aspired liberated and dignifying space, as the revolutionary re-appropriation of these symbolic nodes of power was not included in any political agenda.

My three entries (subversive film, el warch and siwa) were published in the Documenta Fifteen: Handbook (The Exhibition Companion) Edited by Ruangrupa in 2022 and published by Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Under the guiding principle of lumbung, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa is less concerned with individual works than with forms of collaborative working. As a reference work, companion, and innovative art guide, the Handbook offers orientation for these comprehensive processes; it is aimed at visitors to the Kassel exhibition as well as those interested in collective practice. All the protagonists at documenta fifteen and their work are presented by international authors who are familiar with the respective artistic practice and cultural context. Entitled "lumbung," the book introduces the mindset and cultural background of documenta fifteen illustrating the artistic work processes with numerous drawings. A chapter on Kassel presents and explains all the locations of the show, including the artists and collectives represented here.

We are reaching out to you with the second  episode of our new series 'Kitchen BRoadcast', a conversation on what it is that we mean when we talk about the museum, contemporary arts, the decolonial in the arts or about decolonizing the arts and the end of the contemporary? In this episode of Kitchen Broadcast, we have lunch with Lara Khaldi and Rolando Vazquez, to discuss Rolando’s new book ‘Vistas of Modernity. Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary.’ and Lara her recent curatorial work and reflections on the archive, the museum, the Palestine Museum in particular and the email essay she wrote to Mette Edvardsen on the Phantom Archive. Kitchen Broadcast is an ongoing online conversation, listening to different voices, rhythms and sounds that reflect contemporary situations crossing their path in Brussels, curated by Joachim Ben Yakoub & Reem Shilleh. With sound engineering magic of Sofyann Ben Youssef and the support of Kaaitheater. This episode is also made possible with the kind support of DeBuren, Kunstenpunt and Sociaal Fonds voor De Podiumkunsten.

FEU2FORÊT brings together a number of artists to reimagine 30 years of revolt in Brussels through different burning aesthetics.  

It is now 40 years ago in France and England, 30 years ago in Belgium, when different relegated urban neighborhoods in these European countries took fire. A memorial, monument, or even a reference in the curriculum, is nowhere to be found. The smoke generated by these riotous and righteous forms of refusal, is by contrast still very present, still asphyxiating. The fire still burning different postcolonial metropoles, was ignited by persevering police control, sharply cutting through, compartmentalizing urban space and restricting movement, hampering respiration in neighborhoods overpopulated by an already damned class of “immigrant workers”. Pointing out the lack of monument or allusion in the curriculum or canon is not a demand for recognition, quite on the contrary. Conscious of your malediction, we don’t want to be pushed back in your game. Nor is it a question of fetishizing the past, to romanticize, disembody or dis-member revolt as mere spectacle. Starting from the impossibility to represent ourselves or to be represented, it merely proposes to compel us to ask from where and in what forms stories can be told, be made to reverberate and finally burn down the simulacrum of History.

Not long after its official inauguration, two rebellious students tag the marble pedestal of the legendary equine statue of first president of independent Tunisia. Ghassen Bouazzi, head of the syndicalist student movement and Hamza Nasri, activist of the Popular Front, adorn the foot of the presidential sculpture with the phrase weldek fi dārek(“Your children should stay in your house”) and added we-nsībek zēda(“and your brother-in-law too”). The graffiti action echoes the griefs of a growing part of the population, apparently fed up with the seemingly persistent regime nepotism, now hiding behind a veil of historicity. Bouizi an Hasri are eventually arrested for vandalizing the statue and accused of offense against the head of state, but the Court eventually dismisses their case.

Dans un premier temps, je voudrais approfondir la figure du mouton noir dans l'œuvre de Malek Ganou, et ceci en relation avec un contexte politique précis : les diverses controverses liées à la relation tendue entre une liberté nouvellement acquise et les collectivités militantes islamistes fraîchement constituées – ce qui interroge les limites du sacré dans l'espace public. Dans un second temps, j’examinerai la performativité de l'installation vidéo mobile Dead Meat Moving et sa relation au geste du sacrifice, en réimaginant le mouton noir à travers la figure du corps précarisé et étouffé des damnés de l'histoire tunisienne, trop souvent réitérée dans la figuration du harrag, martyr ou djihadiste, trois subjectivités sacrifiées aux frontières globales de la postcolonie. Ensuite, j’analyserai le Black Show, qui illustre parfaitement ce qu'Abdelkebir Khatibi1 appelle une double critique, nécessaire pour affronter des constellations politiques complexes et violemment conflictuelles. Enfin, je rapproche les deux éléments du diptyque, non pas pour condamner le jeu populaire des combats de béliers, ni le rituel religieux candide et profondément significatif mais, bien au contraire, afin de démontrer comment, dans leur composition performative, Dead Meat Moving et le Black Show ont réussi à transformer ce qui est désapprouvé, marginalisé et désolé, en ce que Homi Bhabha appellerait un tiers-lieu critique et sensible, permettant l’apparition non seulement d’une pensée- autre, mais aussi d’une pratique-autre post-révolutionnaire trop souvent réduite au silence et donc inouïe. Un Chapitre publier dans le livre Attaques # 3. (2021, p.323-343)

A walk through the exhibition “Le Déracinement. On Diasporic Imaginations” In spring 2021, Z33 – House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture in Hasselt, Belgium hosted the exhibition Le Déracinement: On Diasporic Imaginations. Curated by Silvia Franceschini and including work by artists Mohamed Bourouissa, Kapwani Kiwanga, Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Fatma Bucak and the Otolith group, the whole visual dispositif of the exhibition was centered around French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s photographic work, produced in Algeria between 1958 and 1961.  Upon visiting, I wondered how an exhibition revolving around the photographic work of a sociologist such as Bourdieu might relate to intrinsically colonial dynamics of uprooting and displacement. But also how a curator operating in an art institution such as Z33 might relate to such a sensitive and thorny topic as diasporic imagination, in the intrinsic contradiction of showing this work within such a—at times violent—context of an institutionalized museum. Nonetheless, I decided to put that set of questions aside for a moment, and surrendered myself to the challenging winding path set out by Silvia Franceschini. My understanding of the process of uprooting and diasporic displacement eventually turned inside out, moved from the liberated land of Algeria and Mali, via the still colonized overseas departments of Martinique and French Guiana, over the hearth of British Empire through the Black Atlantic to end in contemporary war-ridden Syria.

The afterlives of a monstrous colonial monument are being contested in the heart of Belgium. Engaging in a visual analysis of the PeoPL happening, facilitated by artivist Laura Nsengiyumva, I will argue that this visual proposition is witness to a renewed wave of revolt, altering a still very present colonial order, its vibrant properties of space and possibilities of time. By melting down an ice-reproduction of the equestrian statue of Leopold II, Nsengiyumva renders visible the lingering possibility to restructure the shared division of the sensible proper to the colonial present of Belgium and beyond. This wave of revolt opened a discursive space that altered the conditions through which difference was historically thematised. From (failed) multiculturalism, diversity, superdiversity and the present turn in securitisation through the misnomer of radicalisation, processes of inclusion/exclusion are for the first time in history being discussed on the conditions of the primary concerned.

In the wake of a plethora of colonial and imperial monument ceremonialized destructions, the demolition of the Vendôme Column by the Paris Commune appears as paradigmatic. Joachim Ben Yakoub reflects on this key event, and on three recent artworks inspired by it.

Kitchen Broadcast is an online radio broadcast curated by Joachim Ben Yakoub and Reem Shilleh. In the presence of Hela Yousfi, Mohamed Toukabri, and Nidhal Chamekh, this Kitchen Broadcast Dinner proposes to critically reflect on postcolonial critiques, and to push for historical transformations – somewhere in between the Maghreb, Paris and Brussels. Exactly ten years ago, on December 2010, Tunis set the world on fire. From the Kasbah and Tahrir, to Plaza del Sol and Syntagma square, to the center of capital in Wall Street, the whole world was occupied by a sense of indignation. While the demands for freedom were easily met through cosmetic democratic reforms, the demands for bread and dignity are still left unanswered. However, globalized authoritarianism fueled by police violence, racism and islamophobia, seems again on the rise, also in Europe. Contrary to Brussels and Paris, decolonization is not (yet) a metaphor in the Maghreb. After almost a century and a half of colonial domination, and six decades of postcolonial rule, and now ten years of revolt, decolonial demands in the Maghreb may today at first sound outdated, at best anachronistic. Its current timid resurgence in the discourses of a diasporic minority however, is witness to a possible revitalization. High time for an in-depth conversation.

De beste manier om een beweging als Black Lives Matter in België te neutraliseren? De deur wagenwijd openzetten, commissies oprichten en activisten verdelen door hen te lokken met postjes en machtsposities.’ Onderzoekers Emma-Lee Amponsah en Joachim Ben Yakoub doen in een dubbelinterview hun licht vallen op de antiracismebeweging in België anno 2020 en blikken terug op de grote verontwaardiging, collectieve rouw en solidariteit.

Bouchra Khalili’s proposition for The Diasporic Schools at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2020 begins with a series of individual encounters with members of a new generation of Maghrebi artists and activists in Brussels, later to be complemented with moments of contact in other European cities. Out of the relations shaping these meetings and conversations, she is forming a living online family album of voices, re-establishing stories of resistance and repairing memories of rebellion. In her search for the meaning of voices produced by the persistence of history resonating and echoing in the present, to paraphrase Khalili, she decided to close her eyes and listen to the murmurs circulating and resonating in the diasporic al-halqa of Brussels. To convey these family stories to her audience, Khalili returns to the collaborative methods of her previous work, reconsidering the figuration of the civic poet as hlayqi·a. https://audiofamilyalbum.com/  

Adil Charrot, Lamine Bangoura, Mehdi Bouda, Dieumerci Kanda, Mawda Shawri, Semira Adamu. Dit waren enkele van de namen om wie gerouwd werd door meer dan 15.000 mensen, gemobiliseerd voor de waardigheid van zwarte levens in het hart van Europa, in juni 2020. De verontwaardiging over de moord op George Floyd en Breonna Taylor door de Amerikaanse politie vond weerklank in Brussel. Het straatnaambordje van de ‘Lloyd George Avenue’ aan de rand van het Zoniënwoud, werd omgedoopt tot ‘F-Loyd George’. Woede en verontwaardiging convergeerden tegen het steeds zichtbaarder wordende dodelijke politiegeweld tijdens de COVID-19 lockdown en het nog steeds levendige structurele racisme, de negrofobie en de islamofobie in het politiekorps en in de brede maatschappij.

Waarom rijmt democratisering niet met dekolonisering van de kunsten? Spelers in de plantage­-economie van de kunsten verlangen naar het dekoloniale verhaal. Het blijkt een treurig plan om oude, superdiverse en democratische wijn in nieuwe dekoloniale kruiken te serveren. De enige remedie om de kater te boven te komen, lijkt een overgave aan de aangeboden dans.

Choreographer and performer Amanda Piña is steadily building an embodied praxis that aligns itself with the re-emergence of endangered ancestral movements, dance forms and worlds at large. In a context of accelerated extraction of natural resources, plundering of land and life, she is slowly developing a grounded body of subversive work. One of her collaborators, de-colonial thinker Rolando Vázquez acknowledges that, while dancing otherwise, Piña fundamentally unsettles the coloniality of sensing and knowing proper to the fields of performing arts and inspires the imagination of “a world in which many worlds fit.” A diptych about an ever-moving praxis, challenging the colonial boundaries of our very being, revitalizing deeper relations and vibrant cosmologies, breathing life back in the center of our concerns.

During the latest uprising in Tunisia, the agitated crowd almost totally destroyed the autocratic monumental landscape. As the provocative ‘Anti-Clock Project’ by visual artist Nidhal Chamekh shows, the strongest element of this landscape was not destroyed; it still stands in the capital today and illustrates how the imbricated strata of the contemporary monumental landscape can be understood as an inherited palimpsest that reveals hegemonic assumptions about the prevailing politics of time. The monumental translation of the new era promoted by the contested Ben Ali regime paradoxically froze the idea that change would facilitate general progress, innovation, modernization and development and guarantee a better future. In this article, we argue that the Clock Tower and the civilization project it materializes, initiated by colonial occupation and upheld by the consecutive postcolonial regimes, does not necessarily warrant a better future. Rather, it continues to restrain political sensibilities in the present time, dismisses historical pasts and withholds alternative futures. Published in the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Volume 12: Issue 3, pp 303–327

When analysing the Tunisian uprising through its aesthetics, the premonitory and subversive agency of the artistic sphere becomes intelligible. This contribution, therefore, engages in a reconstruction of an often overlooked local and historical sequence of aesthetic contention and asks if this sequence prefigured the Tunisian uprising. This seditious premonitory subversion grew into a generalized practice as it emerged into full daylight during the liberation phase of the uprising as an important mediator of the fundamental changes the country was taking itself through. The specific practices that structured the aesthetics of Tunisian uprising were thus already formed a decade before the self-immolation of Tarek el-Tayeb Mohammed Bouazizi. This insight is not only fruitful in relation to the ongoing debates reconstructing the historical dynamics that preceded the revolution, but also gives important insights into the visionary subversive dynamics the artistic sphere is still engaging in today, maybe sensing the next battle coming. Co-authored with Sami Zemni, Published in International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019, Volume 23, Issue 2

Le glas a sonné pour l’Europe, si elle ne prend pas ses responsabilités pour plus de 500 ans d’histoire coloniale et d’exploitation esclavagiste. Répondre à la demande de plus en plus urgente de réparation par des rétributions financières pour toutes les blessures coloniales et par la restitution des objets volés par la Belgique serait un bon début. Ecrit ensemble avec Gia Abrassart  pour Rekto Verso,

I invited Olivier Marboeuf to speak about the decolonizing fever that has recently infected even the most respectable old Belgian cultural institutions for the journal Recto/Verso—a subject that has been exciting the venerable old houses of the French art world just as much. Olivier MArbouef took advantage of the thread of this conversation to go deeper into a few decolonial variations in terms of the politics of story and cacophony, of troubling presences and places that flee—where the minority body must invent personal distance, stakes and landscapes.

Combining key insights from aesthetic theory and various postcolonial critiques, this research looks into the aesthetics of revolt. Taking the recent and exceptional sequences of revolts in Tunisia as a case study and thus starting from an extensive and unique fieldwork, and by unraveling contrapuntally the complex entanglement of processes of politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics, revolting senses show how state aesthetics are always historically formed and how the sensible, or that what can be seen, imagined or embodied, is consequently shared, divided and distributed, but also how accumulated aesthetic agency can question and possibly alter this shared distribution in times of revolt. This study apprehends revolt in a phenomenological way as a lived, embodied and visual experience and thus as a process of diversion or reappropriation of spectacular power. It contends that revolt has the potential to alter a given police order. Nevertheless, the often too precipitated contentions that the moving body politic would have radically altered the order of the sensible, during the latest sequences of revolt in Tunisia, is altogether tempered. This dissertation points at the intricacies that accompany the processes of revolt against a firmly seated police order, especially the difficulty of creating different conditions of intelligibility and possibility that entail a fundamental transformation of what appears to sense experiences. These particular intricacies could somehow have been foreseen as aesthetics was explicitly grasped as a historically formed contrapuntal ensemble or as an all-encompassing realm that is made of different intermeshed, overlapping, and mutually embedded histories traversed by a colonial divide.

In May NTGent published the Ghent Manifesto. Inspired by the groundbreaking Dogma 95-Manifesto for film, it consists of ten rules the artists who’s work is produced by the city theatre, will have to follow–or at least relate to–from now on. NTGent-director Milo Rau and doctoral researcher Joachim Ben Yakoub discuss some of the restrictions mentioned in the manifesto. “It’s like dancing with handcuffs.” The two men meet in the building of the Flemish radio and television broadcasting organization VRT, where Milo Rau is invited for a primetime talk show. Since he recently became the artistic leader of the Ghent city theatre, the renowned Swiss director hasn’t suffered from a lack of media attention in Flanders. The public call for an ex-Jihadi fighter to participate in a theatre project based on the 15th century Van Eyck-altarpiece The Adoration Of The Mystic Lamb generated quite some uproar. And La Reprise, his first production for NTGent dealing with the homophobic murder of Ihsane Jarfi in Liège, was critically praised. Joachim Ben Yakoub is on course to finish his doctoral thesis on the aesthetics of recent upsurges of revolt in Tunisia, and recently co-edited a highly debated issue of the cultural magazine Rekto: Verso on the decolonization of the Flemish cultural field. He feels critically challenged by Rau’s artistic practice and some of the rules in the Manifesto.

The authoritarian regime in Tunisia can be defined as an intensive bio-political regime where disciplinary techniques of surveillance and governmentality are entangled with sovereign logics of exceptionality and decisionism. Authority and power is woven through every aspect of everyday life and to exceptional instances of the power over life and death. Within a bio-political imperative, the body must constantly be managed, governed and controlled. The body is therefore at the same time the strongest medium to enact protest. In this light, we can read the self-sacrifice of the different martyrs during the liberation phase of revolution as a potent symbol of disruption of the expected cooperation of the body within bio-political power that allowed for the appearance of the people in all its complexity and diversity, including the life of the most disenfranchised. Comparing the performances of Fanni Roghman Anni and Danseurs–Citoyens, two different collectives that emerged during the revolution, the performance of self-sacrifice will further be analyzed as a condition for the coming into being of a necro-political space of appearance. Not only the bodies in the street but additional embodied artistic performances during the constitutive phase of the revolution produce extra-discursive effects outside the bio-political logic, that allowed to further engage in fundamental ethical question in the future constitution of new post-revolutionary body politic. Published in the volume edited by Gržinić Marina and Aneta Stojnić, Shifting corporealities in contemporary performance: danger, im/mobility and politics. (Springer, 2018: pp 251–274)

When making sense of the world from the vantage point of the global south, and from Tunisia in particular, a direct line can be drawn from the revolts of 1968 to the recent series of uprisings that shook the world in 2011. Both form discrete turning points in a continuous struggle for an "unfinished independence". Time and again, however, the claims for liberation and dignity embodied and enunciated in these worldwide struggles, are caught in a web of Eurocentric readings. It therefor remains crucial t point at the fundamental differences between 1968 in Tunis and 1968 in Paris, as di philosophers like Michel Foucault and Albert Memmi. Exposing the historical tensions between Tunsi and Paris in 1968, but also in 2011, from the perspective of the global south, will hopefully facilitate the vital insight why the recent demands to "occupy Tunis" might seem superfluous in the light of the latest demand to "decolonize Wall street". 

The online dance performance Here(s) of the inseparable artist duo Selma and Sofiane Ouissi took place in October 2011 during the opening of the Meeting Points 6 festival, an initiative of the Young Arab Theatre Fund. Sister and brother Sofiane en Selma gradually formed - from one performance to the next - a single body through their shared practice as dancer and choreographer, until Selma moved to Paris and Sofiane was left alone in Tunis. Thanks to real-time video communication applications, they managed to bridge the distance between both metropolises and thus found a way to reconstitute their shared practice and reflection. During Here(s) they share this initially rather practical communicative bridging, which gradu- ally grew into a full-fledged choreography. In what follows we will delve deeper into the question how this performance touches on the essence of current global challenges in a clear, refined manner. Subsequently, the Meeting Points festival, in which this performance took place, will be seized in order to linger on the necessity to review existing practices transnationally, to anchor them sustainably and lastly, to interweave them from below with other relevant local diasporic practices. Throughout this exercise I hope to touch upon possible pitfalls in setting up collaborative relations with the MENA region from the privileged position that the capital of Europe, at least for now, still enjoys. The main challenge will be to understand the apparent contradiction between different types of global and local dynamics and thus to discern the importance of their inevitable entanglement and to take into account its political implications. A necessary exercise, certainly now Tunisia is included in the Creative Europe programme

Elke vrijdag schrijft een van onze vijf vaste online correspondenten een brief aan iemand. Deze week brengt Joachim Ben Yakoub een ode aan de zwarte engelfiguur van de Brusselse rapper en performer Pitcho: 'een aardse contradictie in ons collectieve onderbewustzijn, want er is toch niets witter dan de verschijning van een engel?'

Coloring outside the lines of the nation : an iconological analysis of the Tunisian Revolution The Tunisian revolution not only liberated the country of its tenacious autocratic ruler, it also impacted, in a profound way, the imagination of prevailing political subjectivities. After Ben Ali fled the country, unsettled post-colonial tensions over the delineation of these changing subjectivities reemerged, coloring outside the lines of the nation. The present paper analyzes this contentious process of becoming through an iconological analysis of the entangled dynamics of reimagination that the national flag underwent during the Tunisian revolution, starting from the liberation phase in December 2010, through the constitutional phase and the promulgation of the new constitution in 2014, until the inauguration of the National Flag Square in March 2017. The present iconological analysis is not only paradoxically witness to the very limitation of the power of icons to engender dignified relationalities within a given nation, but is also witness to the slow closure of the revolutionary space and the gradual blockage of revolutionary processes of subject formation. This blockage was productive for the precarious restoration of national unity and state prestige necessary for the completion of the new constitution, but less for the demands for liberty, social justice and dignity so central to the revolution.  

Although Congo gained independence half a century ago, colonial history remains permanently engraved in the colonial statues and monuments that adorn Belgium's public spaces. While Congo has challenged this iconography by continually updating its symbols, in Belgium, time seems to have stood still. Or almost! While various artists are reconciling the past and the present, transforming the Belgian urban landscape by proposing Congolese references or diverting colonial references, Belgian society seems frozen in its colonial relics. Co-authored with Gia Abrassart for the book edited by Demart, Sarah, and Abrassart Gia (2016) Créer en postcolonie. 2010-2015-voix et dissidences belgocongolaises  

The censorship and strict regulation of the public sphere during autocratic times in Tunisia took their toll on artistic freedoms as they anesthetized most of cultural life. The revolutionary movement however marked the beginning of the 21st century in a hopeful way. Five years later, the Nomadic Art Center, Moussem, invited five young Tunisian directors to show their work on the stages of BOZAR and the  “Maison des Cultures” in Brussels.   The festival explored how artists look back on this period and tackled the question how artists can contribute to the construction of a new social conscience on the ruins of an autocratic regime. co-authored with Fida Hammami for Arab Stages, Volume 2, Number 2 

For our 142nd issue of Etcetera we asked researcher Joachim Ben Yakoub and choreographer Fabian Barba to ‘decolonize’ prominent terminology of the performing arts discourse in Flanders. co-authored with Fabian Barba for Etcetera

Vertrekkend vanuit onderzoek naar en in stadswijken concluderen de auteurs dat zelfs de vlag ‘multiculturele maatschappij’ tekortschiet om de diversiteit van de hedendaagse samenlevingen te begrijpen. ‘Vlamingen maken na 22 uur geen lawaai meer. Ze spreken Nederlands, zijn punctueel en vinden gezondheid heel belangrijk. De Vlamingen leven niet op straat, ze houden van rust en stilte.’ Zo schetste de Vlaamse overheid in zijn legendarische ‘starterspakket Inburgering’ het beeld van ‘de Vlamingen’. Zouden er vandaag nog mensen rondlopen die deze karikatuur ernstig nemen? Vertrekkend vanuit onderzoek naar en in wijken in Brussel, Antwerpen en Gent concluderen Ico Maly, Jan Blommaert en Joachim Ben Yakoub dat zelfs de vlag ‘multiculturele maatschappij’ tekortschiet om de diversiteit van de hedendaagse samenlevingen te begrijpen. Door toegenomen mobiliteit, globalisering en het internet is de wereld en ieders leven grondig veranderd. Daardoor moeten we onze democratie herdenken, verbeteren en verdiepen.  Ico Maly is doctor in de cultuurwetenschappen, coördinator van Kif Kif en gastprofessor aan het Rits. Hij schreef o.a. N-VA. Analyse van een politieke ideologie (EPO, 2012).Jan Blommaert is hoogleraar taal, cultuur en globalisering aan de universiteiten van Tilburg en Gent. Hij publiceerde o.a. De heruitvinding van de samenleving (EPO, 2011).Joachim Ben Yakoub is stafmedewerker beeldvorming en diversiteit bij de Pianofabriek in Brussel en doctoraal onderzoeker bij de Middle East And North Africa Research Group.

Het portret van de voormalige president van Tunesië staat nog steeds op het netvlies van elke Tunesiër gebrand. Na 23 jaar dictatuur keken de mensen er niet meer naar op, tot een jongeman zichzelf in brand stak in de winter van 2010–2011. De Tunesische revolutie zorgde voor een hernieuwde aandacht voor het staatsportret, zij het op een wel heel bijzondere manier.

Since its first edition in 2012, SYSTEM_D has been the festival for up and coming cinematographic talent from Brussels. SYSTEM_D is a network of and platform for independent Brussels-based filmmakers, as well as an incubator for the production of their films. It also conducts research on the state of films produced without support from Belgian film funds. Brussels is overflowing with invisiblized and silenced talents, busy surviving and barely involved in formal structures. SYSTEM_D was born out of a need to make their realities and stories visible and appreciated. It celebrates the ingenuity and resilience of self-taught Brussels creators and supports them in various ways. The most important aspect of this is the biennial film festival SYSTEM_D, which deliberately opts for an eclectic and raw selection without formal conditions. Between editions, there is always SYSTEM_D ON TOUR, where a selection of films is shown throughout Brussels and far beyond, so that local and distant audiences can discover Brussels talent. www.festivalsystemd.be SYSTEM_D is a collaboration between Citylab Pianofabriek, KVS and other partners.

Een gesprek met Hedi Thabet over dans, theater en de Tunesische revolutie. De regisseur Hedi Thabet is geen onbekende meer na zijn tournee met het stuk ‘Ali’, een duoproductie met Mathurin Bolze. Eigenlijk is Hedi Thabet geen regisseur, ook geen artiest. Thabet is geen danser, noch jongleur of acrobaat. Thabet is gewoonweg Hedi. Zoon van Lisbeth en Lotfi en iemand die altijd ‘nee’ antwoordt op mijn vragen. Niet dat hij een tegendraads iemand is, maar wel iemand die steeds zoekt naar het juiste antwoord, om op een radicale en eerlijke manier te verduidelijken, om tot de essentie van de zaak, zijn werk en zijn verhaal te komen.

Kitchen Broadcast is an ongoing series of online conversations, listening in on friendly voices, rhythms and sounds in the Kitchen, a space in Brussels dedicated to collective practices, study and memorial justice. You can listen to all the episodes here.