Rafram Chaddad: restoring bonds erased by history

Born in Djerba in 1976 into one of the oldest families of Hara Sghira (the “little Jewish quarter”), Rafram Chaddad grew up in Jerusalem. He returned to Tunisia for the first time twenty years ago and settled there ten years ago. In Tunisia, he developed an artistic work on the disappearance and almost invisible traces of his family, which is part of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Autobiographical details and anecdotes confront places that have hardly retained any trace of them. The very form of Rafram Chaddad’s works is evanescent. He takes over public spaces (a hammam, a fish market, an abandoned synagogue, a desert) for the duration of a performance. In the manner of arte povera, his installations and sculptures require few resources and feed on the networks of relationships they establish. Food, insofar as it carries the deepest echo of origins and brings people together for a meal—plays an important role in his work. A photographer by training, Rafram Chaddad is particularly attentive to the versatile role of images and the importance of representations in the construction of individual and collective memory.

Omnipresent in Tunisian visual culture, the auspicious signs of the fish and the number 5 are intented to ward off the evil eye and are recurring motifs in the work of Rafram Chaddad. In Fish Smuggler (2018), he X-rays five fish in a suitcase, in the manner of the X-ray scanners used for baggage checks at airport border crossings. The image, displayed in a lightbox, was shown for the first time at the Mucem in Marseille, near the transit camp where the Chaddad family stayed after leaving Tunisia. “My mother would regularly ask me to bring her fish from Tunisia. It has an incomparable taste for her. So, I found myself in the situation of ‘smuggling’ fish across borders. Fish are interesting because they don’t live on land. Humans are very good at drawing borders on land, but it’s very difficult to draw them in the sea. Of course, they do it anyway. But in the sea, fish can swim freely from Tunis to Sicily. So what, do we call them Italian fish? Don’t give them passports!”

“Until I moved to Tunis in 2014, it was as if I had a frozen image of Tunisia. My mother’s stories in the Lafayette district of Tunis, in Djerba, the Passover lamb… there was a lot of nostalgia in these stories. And in 2014, it was as if I entered the image and became part of it. The work of an artist has nothing to do with nostalgia or even history: it has to do with the contemporary, the present moment. Now, when we talk about the Jews of Tunisia, the expression in Tounsi that comes up all the time, in Tunisia as in the diaspora, is ‘Ya hasra!’, ‘It was the good old days!’ As if we would rather talk of the past than look to the present.”

Thus, Rafram Chaddad doesn’t seek to revive the past but to reactivate forgotten places, communities, and stories in the present in order to re-establish bonds erased by history. The mosaic is one of the most highly valued art forms in Tunisia; it is emblematic of Carthage and ancient civilization and can be admired in the most beautiful national museums, as well as at the entrances to official buildings or in the halls of grand hotels. In History Class (2023), Rafram Chaddad reproduces in mosaic form a photograph of his grandmother Khamsana and a video capture of Halima, the mother of the photographer and black Tunisian anti-racist activist Lotfi Ghariani. The work was produced in the midst of a wave of racist violence against black people—whether Tunisian or migrants from sub-Saharan Africa—exacerbated by official discourse fuelling hatred, despite the existence of an anti-racism law adpoted in 2018.

With History Class Rafram Chaddad wants to give visibility to people made invisible by official historical representations in an effort of contemporary archaeology. In the image, his grandmother wears a sefsari, the traditional Tunisian veil. For his work, the artist collaborated with Mouldi Kasem’s mosaic workshop, which is regularly called upon for official commissions. “There aren’t many mosaics of black people. We had to use dark stones that we baked in the oven seven times to reproduce Halima’s face in micro-mosaic. The idea with this work was that visitors could be challenged at a glance. The title History Class signals the lack of visibility of Tunisian Jews, Blacks and women in official history. But it is more broadly about otherness and the belief that an identity is never monolithic.”

Discover Rafram Chaddad’s work on his website.

Chiraz Chouchane: beneath the surface of images

Living in France for twenty years, Chiraz Chouchane 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. It can be compared to naïve, spiritualist, or conceptual art, while retaining, deeply experimental and sensory dimension. The artist is engaged in a profound exploration of the individual and collective unconscious, in the manner of the Surrealists, but by taking her own paths. Like them, she summons visions, hidden symbols and coded languages, seeking to reveal invisible realities that escape rational logic and dominant narratives, like in Leïla et les fantômes (2023) which deconstructs the vestiges of the past between Tunisia and France, to heal wounds and enable reconciliation for a new generation.

Like the Surrealists, who practiced automatic writing and sought to abolish the boundaries between dream and reality, Chiraz Chouchane seems to let her works construct themselves, in an endogenous process where chance and instinct play an essential role. This is the case, for example, with her poems composed in collaboration with the German philosopher Bruno Haas: the artist notes down words and phrases that come to her in her dreams, and is astonished to discover with her teacher (Chiraz Chouchane was then a doctoral student in arts and art sciences at the Sorbonne) that they make sense in Old German, even though she is not a German speaker.

In this material, she cuts out details or fragments that she rearranges in triangular or pyramidal compositions, seemingly suspended on the surface of the white sheet. Their shape can evoke flint, the tip of a sword or a crystal. “I see this shape as a celestial and sharp body, with a point of equilibrium that is like a dialectical point that both separates and joins, an energetic point like an origin towards which meaning, language, is directed,” the artist writes to us. These works, which she calls “photomontages/collages”, play on the association of disparate elements, generating visions where dream and reality, the divine and the earthly, image and text intertwine.

In the Codex 17-18 (2023) series, she repurposes canivets (small holy pictures) found on the internet or bought in a religious bookshop. These devotional images, often made on finely cut paper, sometimes illuminated or printed, were used as objects of devotion in 17th and 19th century Europe. Chiraz Chouchane hollows out the Christian icons they contain to keep only the frame and place new figures in it. “It is like craftsmanship because the canivets are quite fragile. Strangely, the word canivet also refers to the tool, the blade that allows cutting, incising. The sharp point cuts, eliminates but also opens the image to another dimension. A sort of consecration of the image as Agamben would say – speaking of the wax effigy that replaces the sovereign’s body at his burial. The miniature figures and landscapes that I draw in ink and watercolor replace the pious images that I have removed. It wasn’t intentional at all, but the desire to look for other divine figures beyond the religious was there. I wanted to make them more universal. The sometimes shamanic aspect of these new figures is perhaps that sacredness that is taken away from men and usually reserved for the gods. To consecrate is to make something sacred.”

Here again, armed with a blade and a drypoint needle, Chiraz Chouchane covers the plates with drawings, symbols and graphic signs: hands, eyes, snatches of woods, rhizomes, little figures, etc. Some plates are deliberately left intact, as the passage of time has done its work and naturally created “beautiful arborescences and constellations”. This ancient process also carries with it a whole culture and a role in the construction of the imagination and representations. While in France they captured the memories of family life, in Tunisia silver bromide photographic plates were mainly used by European travelers, French missions and studios set up during the period of the French Protectorate, to document the territory or immortalize street scenes, landscapes and “native types” through a lens imbued with colonial culture.

By reappropriating these media, Chouchane also reverses the aesthetic that has frozen the image of her country of origin for a century. She opens a space for listening to another world. “My work with the image is experimental, a bit like amateur archaeology. I try to act on the image in order to reveal another (presence): the fantasy that one image can conceal another always hangs over me! So I use several methods: scratching with blades, erasing, gluing back together, replacing, cutting out, reorganizing, etc. In a way, it’s about deconstructing and undoing the images and letting a hidden memory show through, inventing it when there is nothing there.” Historically used for religious texts and scientific or philosophical treatises, the codex is the ancestor of the printed book. In these three series, Chiraz Chouchane draws an imaginary genealogy to “rediscover a reconciling memory or origin that tends towards an anachronistic point of view”. Thus the past and the present are not separate and linear, but can meet and transform each other in a fleeting moment, a ‘flash’. Heterogeneous elements can come together in a new way, revealing hidden connections between different periods and realities. In this dynamic vision of history, events from the past can resonate in the present, and meaning can be created from this confrontation.

Discover Chiraz Chouchane’s work on her Instagram.

Farah Khelil: an archaeology of the gaze

In a hybrid practice combining photography, drawing, installation, sculpture, video and artist’s books, Farah Khelil questions the mechanisms of art display and mediation. How are works perceived, contextualized and interpreted as a result of the implicit conventions that govern their exhibition? Archives and vernacular production (postcards, administrative documents, history books, catalogues raisonnés) play a central role in Farah Khelil’s work, enabling her to follow the trail of images and analyze their context of production, dissemination and circulation.

“As a student at the Beaux-Arts in Tunis, I did not have access to original works in museums or galleries. It was only through history books and catalogues raisonnés that I gained access to the meaning of the work.” It is from this experience that Farah Khelil develops a conceptual approach that questions the way in which works of art are perceived and publicized. Combining drawing, photography, installation, sculpture, video and artist’s books, her work functions as a translation device: she collects, deconstructs and reassembles elements from reality (texts, images, archives, sounds, etc.) to offer a fragmented and plural reinterpretation.

By discovering that eucalyptus is a plant imported during the protectorate, the artist questions her familiar environment and her relationship to history, botany and modes of representation. After extensive research in the archives and discussions with the exhibition curator Clélia Coussonnet, who specializes in botany and politics in contemporary art, Khelil’swork evolved towards the history of the Palmarium, a former winter garden inaugurated under the protectorate in 1902. Transformed over several decades into a casino, music hall, dispensary during the Great War, cinema, ruin after the bombings of 1942, exhibition gallery, then shopping center, this architectural transformation becomes a point of reflection on the history of Tunisia and the evolution of cultural spaces over time.

Rejecting the traditional exhibition format, Farah Khelil chose to renovate an abandoned municipal greenhouse in Belvédère Park. This artistic and political gesture diverts the usual logic of artistic production to question the role of public space and the place of the spectator in the work. The final installation offers an immersive experience, combining vegetation, archives and artworks in the renovated greenhouse, thus redefining the notion of an exhibition as a dispositif that structures the perceptions and behavior of visitors. In an interview with CEMAT, Khelil discusses her project in the greenhouse: “The municipality allowed me to intervene and transform this space. I worked with a specialized company and, for the first time, I led a team, collaborating with workers, gardeners and botanists. Differences in language sometimes complicated the transmission of my intentions. After two years of work, marked by the pandemic, the greenhouse was completely renovated.

“At the same time, I used my research and the archives to create an installation combining my personal impressions with dialectical reflection. The palm tree, a symbol of transcendence and verticality, and the eucalyptus, associated with immanence and horizontality, guided my reflection on space and structured the installation. Inspired by the Palmarium, a place dedicated to commerce, I incorporated visual elements such as shop windows and displays into my work.” By placing the living at the center of her approach, she invites reflection on our relationship to the environment and to the institutional structures of art. Through Effet de Serre and the rehabilitation of this forgotten building, Farah Khelil seeks to reveal a little-known history, the repercussions of which are still visible today. “Insofar as there is only scant data on this building in the archives, with Effet de Serre, I hope to produce forms that will encourage specialists or young researchers to undertake in-depth scientific investigations into the colonial history of plants in Tunisia and the Palmarium, the transformation of which speaks volumes about colonialism, France’s role in changing the country’s architecture, as well as politics and urban planning.”

How can you make history visible when the documents and photographs are fragmented? In her works created after the exhibition at the greenhouse, whose titles evoke botany, the artist uses an approach of composition and juxtaposition. Original blue carbon paper plans, old postcards of the Palmarium, cyanotypes, paintings, recent photographs and excerpts from archival texts are recomposed in different forms. In Feuillages (2023), the artist superimposes archival images, cyanotypes and paintings, forming vertical strata reminiscent of the structure of a plant or tree covered with leaves. In Photosynthèses (2022-2023), Khelil graphically intervenes on cyanotypes created from archival images of the Palmarium or photographs taken near its former location, drawing a parallel with the biological process of photosynthesis. By mobilizing found materials as well as archives or by diverting a place from its primary function, she resurrects a memory and leaves room, rather than imposing a single reading, for a certain ambiguity, engaging the spectator in an active process of interpretation. By highlighting the normative frameworks of the exhibition, she questions the way in which art is narrated by institutions, and participates in a decolonization of the imaginary.

Discover Farah Khelil’s work on her website and on Instagram.

Férielle Doulain-Zouari: archiving the “infra-ordinary”

From the outset, Férielle Doulain-Zouari has made the ordinary, small events and simple gestures of everyday life the very substance of her artistic practice. Whether it be common industrial materials (plastic ropes, wire, electrical cables, PVC pipes, pieces of sponge), artisanal materials (ceramics, terracotta, blown glass) or organic materials (earth, wood, sand, ashes), the artist transforms them to reveal their aesthetic and symbolic potential, highlighting the extraordinary in the ordinary. By using components and textures that create an intimate and physical relationship with the work (the public can sometimes even touch them), by setting up immersive devices (monumental installations, an invitation to stroll through the work) and by the mobilization of basic manual techniques (weaving, knotting, assembling), the artist creates the conditions for an immediate proximity with the work, making her art resonate with common experiences. Engaged in an active contemplation, visitors are invited to take a new look at materials that invisibly populate their daily lives, sparking dialogue and reflection.

Férielle Doulain-Zouari has been spending a lot of time in the Kef region (northwest Tunisia), where her husband wants to take over the family farm. She has childhood memories there herself, as her mother was originally from the town of El Kef. This historically fertile region, the “breadbasket” of the Roman Empire, is today one of the poorest in the country. Drought linked to climate change and water management problems affect traditional crops, resulting in the decline of family farming and rural exodus. Immersed in this new local economic reality, Férielle Doulain-Zouari photographs the traces she perceives in the nature around her on her daily walks using her smartphone. These traces constitute an involuntary art form generated by the environment.

These digital archives of everyday life serve as a reservoir of forms for the artist, from which she draws inspiration for a work in clay, exhibited in 2024 under the name Ce qu’elles façonnent de jour comme de nuit (What they shape day and night) at the Galerie Septième (Paris) and Tilling the Soil at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. In this installation, composed of a checkerboard of 160 terracotta bricks produced by women potters in the south and engraved with lines dug by hand by the artist, she already questions manual labor as a vector of reconnection with nature. For Férielle, working the earth through processes rooted in the history of Tunisia is also like going back in time. The resulting gestures are slow and meticulous; in a way, they are acts of resistance in the face of the acceleration and industrialization of the world. They reaffirm the need to reinvest in temporalities where humans collaborate with matter in search of a balance.

For Moirage naturels (Natural Glitter) (2025), an installation specially created for this exhibition at Jumièges Abbey, Férielle Doulain-Zouari draws on the two photographic inventories Inventaires des adventices and Quotidien. She prints images on microperforated self-adhesive vinyl sheeting and fixes them on blue plastic mesh whose reflections shimmer slightly in contact with the air and the sun. These nets are usually used on farmland to protect crops. Here, they are studded with digital photographic archives and unfold organically on structures made of branches using recycled materials (dead wood, ropes), normally used by farmers in the Kef region to provide shelter or support for tools and crops. The pixels of the photographs taken with the smartphone are in a way amplified by the superimposition of the two plastic frames studded with holes of slightly different diameters. The reflections of the light and the folds on the plastic support create moiré and superimposition effects that alter the original image even further. With Moirages naturels, the artist essentially recreates an ecology, inviting visitors to better perceive natural balances, how the different elements of an ecosystem function together, and how human activities influence these interactions.

Discover Férielle Doulain-Zouari’s work on her website and on Instagram.