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.
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.
Drop by drop, an ice replica of the late king Leopold II's equestrian statue is slowly melting away under its radiant reversed pedestal, hanging upside down from the ceiling in the hallway of a secondary school in the Marolles neighbourhood of Brussels, October 2018. The artist Laura Nsengiyumva turned the foundation of the colonial monument into the base of a heat lamp, inscribed with the letters of the king's name reshuffled, from Leopold to PeoPL. 1 For Nsengiyumva, melting an ice replica of this royal and colonial monument, central to the national history of Belgium, hints at the slow, almost invisible but instrumental, disappearance of the phantasmagorical and imposing presence of the late king, along with the colonial epistemologies the statue embodies in public space.Her happening highlights the patience required to change prevailing dominant attitudes. Yet, in the same breath it also confirms the certainty that change is slowly happening. The materialisation of her dream to knock the sculpture of the late king off his pedestal by turning the base of the statue upside down is not intended to perpetuate the presence of the real statue in Throne Square, in the centre of Brussels. On the contrary, Nsengiyumva sees her happening as a gesture thattogether with the burst of light emanating from the actions of groups of activists, artists and collectivesforesees the eventual ruination of the colonial statue, made of copper and tin extracted in Belgian Congo. Transforming the pedestal into an epitaph would serve as a totem of remembrance of all past and present victims of colonisation. Nevertheless, in her installation the light shining from the upside-down pedestal to melt the ice replica, is envisioned as a homage to the actions of activists and their ancestral
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