Siwa plateforme - L'Economat at Redeyef

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.

Paintings close to concrete art, made by the inhabitants of Redeyef, collected by Jean-Michel Diaz, form the bed of another thorny Redeyef story, facing the photographs of Fakhri El Ghezal. Hamouda Jarrar recounts the story of his famous grandfather, El Hedi Ben Salem, who grew up in Redeyef and worked with German filmmaker Rainer W. Fassbinder. Muntasser, spokesperson for the youth of Redeyef, is present in Kassel as a kind of ambassador. Stories—and ways of telling them— form the material bridge between Redeyef and Kassel, built by Yagoutha and her curatorial team. Bypassing tenacious global frontiers, Siwa challenges inhabitants of Redeyef to host the hospitable space created at documenta fifteen.