Fredj Moussa: capturing mirages

Using video, sculpture and installation, Fredj Moussa engages the viewer in a reflection on the narratives that influence our perception of places and cultures, examining how stories, myths and memories intertwine to shape landscapes that are both real and imaginary. In his last two films, Solar Noon (2022) and Mirage, The Inner Sea (2024), he questions the invisible memory of a dried-up lake on the edge of the Sahara Desert. Mirage, The Inner Sea is based on a true story from 1875, when a French colonial mission planned to flood the Sahara with the Mediterranean Sea. The film reimagines this historical situation and explores its potential consequences by featuring locals who tell the story of their submerged region more than a century later.

In Solar Noon, he uses this site as a theater stage, crossed by the reactivation of three narratives describing this place which looks as empty as a blank page These three stories are comprised of his own, that of the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 486-c. 425 BC), and that of the Greek epic poet Apollonius of Rhodes (c. 295-c. 215 BC). Fredj Moussa tells of the day when, having traveled alone to scout out a location, he found himself caught in a sandstorm, his car buried in the middle of the desert under the midday sun. Herodotus writes about the annual meeting of two tribes separated by Lake Triton, the Machlyes and the Auseans. Every year, the two peoples celebrate a festival in honor of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war, who was born in their territory. During this ritual, young girls, divided into two groups, fight each other with stones and sticks. Those who succumb to their wounds are called “false virgins”.

The shots were taken at a specific time of day, when the sun is at its zenith (Solar Noon). This is the time when mirages can appear. The location is a dried-up lake between the foothills of the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara, on the border between the Maghreb (the west, or sunset) and the Mashreq (the east, or sunrise). It is therefore in a central, “zenith” position. The image of the film is as if burnt by the sun, overexposed, with desaturated colors. Creating an effect of discrepancy and anachronism, the actresses are dressed in plastic costumes, assembled with the collaboration of the artist Antonin Simon Giraudet from materials recovered after the end of a market thanks to a garbage collector: plastic waste, burlap, worn fabrics, sponges, etc. These costumes, made from reused materials, deliberately depart from the cliché aesthetic of Saharan or Berber outfits, creating a striking contrast with their low-tech and DIY (do it yourself) aesthetics.

Ismail Bahri: image of the matter, matter of the image

Ismail Bahri is a pluridisciplinary artist born in 1978 in Tunis. His practice could be described as anti-disciplinary and as an attempt to abandon the mimetic function of the image. He blurs the boundaries between video, photography, performance and sculpture. He stages simple and repetitive gestures that reveal imperceptible phenomena (the flow of a liquid, the capture of light, the traces left by a breath), and plays with natural elements (ink, wind, water, light) to disturb perception and question the materiality of the world. His work is based on an economy of means, favoring devices that are modest but powerful on a sensory and conceptual level.

Revers (2017) is a video that explores the materiality of the printed image and its gradual erasure through a simple and repetitive gesture: the crumpling of a magazine page. This seemingly innocuous movement becomes a ritual that slowly alters the printed image. Little by little, it disappears under the effect of successive manipulations, leaving only traces of ink on the artist’s skin, like a residual memory. Played in a loop every five minutes, the video reveals an infinite cycle, where the printed image inevitably fades away. However, while the manipulation accelerates its disappearance, it also preserves it, by constantly reactivating it and transferring it to the body. This gesture gives the image a new significance, both poetic and political: in an almost meditative movement, it underlines the impermanence of things and the body’s ability to retain a trace of them.

The artist’s attitude, which may seem casual, actually reflects a total availability to the moment, anchoring the photographic process in a sensitive, spontaneous and material practice. He thus makes the spectator a witness to a work against the image and proposes another approach to photography and video. The soundtrack, minutely recording the crinkling of crumpled paper, accentuates this sensory and immersive experience.

“Originally, what interested me in filming this demonstration was the flow of life, the mass effect. I had images of crowds in the history of cinema in mind. Only to realize once on the spot that a tension was created between the historical event and the discharged (or hollowed out) image produced by the device. Many people in the procession mistook me for a journalist but wondered what this device could be. A woman passing behind me said to me, for example, “don’t miss a thing!”, implying, “capture the event, keep it as a memory for the community”. These words reveal the offbeat nature of the experience, insofar as it is less a question of capturing the event than of missing it. I’m shooting blanks. And the idea of shooting blanks is important because it implies a film emptied of part of its content, a film haunted by its absent images. Ultimately, that is what it is all about. Here, there is no film other than the one that unfolds elsewhere, that is projected beyond the screens.” The artist questions the visual certainties linked to light, while using a simple element, paper, to disturb the digital image. Light and seemingly innocuous objects can, through simple gestures, reveal a new perception of the world. Blank Film plays with the mechanics of the image and questions our perception, with an acuity that resonates particularly today.

By preventing immediate access to a clear and complete image, Ismail Bahri pushes us to reflect on the way images are produced, perceived and interpreted. The image is constructed as much in what it shows as in what it suggests. The artist thus explores the tensions between materiality and immateriality, visible and invisible, and presence and absence. He invites us to a poetic and conceptual reflection on the construction of images and the way they are filtered by a medium.

Discover Ismail Bahri’s work on his website.

Younes Ben Slimane: a history of ruins

Younès Ben Slimane is an architect, artist and filmmaker born in 1992 in Tunisia. Architecture occupies a central place in Younès Ben Slimane’s artistic approach. Trained as an architect, he transposes a reflection on space, time and matter into his cinematographic work. Architecture and cinema share a sequential dynamic: just as a building is gradually discovered through the movement of the body in space, a film unfolds through a succession Architecture occupies a central place in Younès Ben Slimane’s artistic approach. Trained as an architect, he transposes a reflection on space, time and matter into his cinematographic work. Architecture and cinema share a sequential dynamic: just as a building is gradually discovered through the movement of the body in space, a film unfolds through a succession of shots and sequences. In his videos, this influence is reflected in a particular attention to the construction of frames, to the relationship between humans and their environment, as well as to the materiality of landscapes and natural elements (earth, water, fire). Through his films shot in southern Tunisia, where his father’s family is from, Younès Ben Slimane does not merely document a territory: he also explores themes such as memory, transmission, the cycle of ruin and reconstruction, transforming spaces into places for reflection on time.

For the last twenty years, a former Tunisian fisherman, Chamseddine Marzoug, whose son himself emigrated illegally to Italy, has been on a mission: to give the shipwrecked a dignified burial. So, with a shovel as his only tool, he offers a burial to those who have taken all the risks, driven by misery and injustice. How can one convey the gloomy atmosphere of the “cemetery of the unknown” in Zarzis and the thickness of the night that surrounds it? We Knew How Beautiful They Were, These Islands focuses on the precise gestures of a man and the silhouettes of anonymous people. The raw emotion of the migratory tragedy is attenuated by a form of asceticism in the staging. The work on the darkness and the setting gives the objects a dimension of relics, and the gestures of the men the air of a ritual. The artist shifts the location and the elements of the ritual: he chooses to film the troglodyte architecture of Matmata (“these underground houses, dug into the earth, appeared in the film like large-scale tombs”) and the fragmented objects (“the metaphor of the beached bodies”).

Regarding this film, Younes Ben Slimane quotes the Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and his famous In Praise of Shadows: “‘A phosphorescent jewel gives off its glow and color in the dark and loses its beauty in the light of day. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.’ In We knew how beautiful they were, these islands, I saw my subjects as phosphorescent stones bathed in dark depths, and I tried each time to reveal gestures or details of ruins and faces.” Part documentary, part fiction, the film rests on a fragile balance: the camera transforms violence into a soothing ritual, it conjures up a terrible reality without ever naming it. Objects substitute for the bodies of the migrants, the living become ghostly. The absence of the disappeared becomes all the more palpable. “We knew how beautiful they were, these islands”: with this work, whose title borrows a line from the Greek poet Georges Seferis, Younès Ben Slimane reminds us that the migrants who take to the sea at the risk of their lives do so with the dream of a better life, despite a precarious or tragic destiny often mapped out in advance.

In Fire Keepers (2023), Younes Ben Slimane focuses on the symbolism of fire, an element in perpetual transformation. In this video, put together solely from informal images filmed by anonymous people during the demonstrations that marked the 10th anniversary of the Tunisian revolution, and collected by the artist on the internet and social networks, Younes Ben Slimane envisages fire as both a metaphysical and concrete element and summons this powerful element in the collective Tunisian imagination to make it a metaphor for resistance. Fire becomes the main protagonist of the film at the same time as it embodies a deeply disrupted political and social situation. Visually, the artist plays with the material qualities of the images of demonstrations that he collects online.

But despite the omnipresence of destruction, Fire Keepers has a regenerative and cathartic dimension. The work is not limited to an observation of fragility – of a civilization, of images – but is part of an attempt at transformation and reconciliation, both for the artist and for a nation seeking to make peace with its past and present.

Discover Younes Ben Slimane’s work on his website and on Instagram.

Discover also: Chiraz Chouchane, Leila and the ghosts (2023)

Living in France for twenty years, Chiraz Chouchane is a visual artist born in 1980 who has created a unique universe where symbols, objects, words and multiple presences intersect. Her work, at the crossroads of drawing, performance, photography and film, takes the form of encrypted poetry, with visionary and shamanic overtones. In Leila and the ghosts (2023), the artist deconstructs the vestiges of the past to heal wounds and enable reconciliation for a new generation. This short fiction film features Leila, a young undocumented woman living alone in a garage in the Paris suburbs, who is saved by the ghosts of two First World War soldiers, Bachir (her great-grandfather) and Salomon. Based on autobiographical elements, this genre film uses fantasy to address social and political issues. It highlights the precarious situation of many foreigners living in France, with contemporary violence echoing the historical violence of the colonial past, and the sacrifice of youth on the battlefield. Through a mixture of the burlesque, black humor and fantasy, the film questions the forgetting of history and the implacability of reality. It seeks to open a door to a hidden, secret and repressed dimension of reality, where the supernatural sublimates Leila’s fragile existence. The impossible creeps into her life with the appearance of the two ghost soldiers, a magical event that turns her destiny upside down, pulling her out of her isolation and enabling her to resolve her inner conflicts and reveal herself.

Discover Chiraz Chouchane’s work on Instagram.