Galerie Ammar Farhat, Sidi Bou Saïd · "Insignia of Citizenship" _ Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris - "Clearings, Tunisia One Year On"
« For most of us, we had never voted in our lives. »
Media : Drawing, Installation, Participatory
Themes : Politics & Revolution
April 2011. We were only a few months past 14 January, and a few months away from the first democratic elections in Tunisian history. Almost overnight, politics became the centre of every conversation, and everyone suddenly became an expert.
Sunday Voters — by analogy with the French expression “Sunday painter” — is a series of seven collages and drawings on paper, presented as part of the exhibition Insignes de citoyenneté at Galerie Ammar Farhat in Sidi Bou Saïd.
The seven boards correspond to political groupings that emerged after the revolution: Islamists, socialists, centrists, liberals, environmentalists, Arab nationalists, and the far left.
To create the works, I sent my friends a questionnaire on Facebook: what words spontaneously came to mind when reading the name of each political group?
I then translated their answers into images.
What interested me was what had been inscribed in our collective memory as political references. We were emerging from a dictatorship. We had never voted. Our references came from regimes that presented themselves as democratic, viewed from afar.
We were all a little lost — myself included.
Throughout the exhibition, visitors were invited to vote.
Each board was accompanied by coloured voting slips corresponding to each political group. A plexiglass ballot box collected the votes. Above it, a text explained in detail how to cast a ballot.
What was beautiful to witness was the excitement and curiosity with which people came to vote — for the first time, even if only in a fictional election.
Even children joined in. They carefully studied each board, tried to decipher it, then went to check with their parents whether they had made the right choice.
On 1 May, the results were displayed: the environmentalists had won.
In this ideal world we had imagined together — the post-revolutionary world where anything seemed possible.
A few months later, the Islamists won Tunisia’s first democratic elections.
Medium / Date
Series of 7 collages and drawings on paper, 25 × 25 cm. Plexiglass ballot box, voting slips.
Insignes de citoyenneté, Galerie Ammar Farhat, Sidi Bou Saïd, April 2011.
Dégagements, la Tunisie un an après, Institut du monde arabe, Paris, 2012.
→ See also : We Will No Longer Eat This Bread — Surreal Flag