17 AUG 2025
8:00 PM–11:00 PM
Guellala, Museum
Program
EXHIBITION TITLE
Water & Earth
SEE DJERBA’s 2025 chapter in Guellala unfolded as an experimental visit to the island’s Heritage Museum. For one night, artists and curators temporarily took over spaces dedicated to preserving the past and re‑inscribed them with the language of contemporary media art. What was usually a site of classification and display became a laboratory for projection, sound, and performative interventions.
The museum’s architecture and ethnographic scenography – pottery rooms, domestic interiors, tools, and ritual objects – were treated not as neutral backdrops, but as active collaborators. Instead of illustrating heritage, the artworks probed how “heritage” itself was produced: who spoke, who was framed, and which memories remained in the margins.
By inviting Djerban and international artists to work inside the museum, SEE DJERBA shifted the institution from a space of preservation to one of negotiation. The experimental visit did not aim to modernise tradition, but to expose the frictions between embodied local knowledge and global media imaginaries. Guellala’s clay, crafts, and oral histories met cameras, sensors, and projections; the result was a provisional, fragile assemblage rather than a fixed display.
This temporary occupation suggested a different role for heritage museums in the Mediterranean: not only as guardians of a finished past, but as hosts for unfinished conversations. In Guellala, SEE DJERBA turned the museum into a site where contemporary media art could listen to, amplify, and sometimes contradict the narratives that usually defined the island’s cultural identity.
ARTISTS
Achref Guesmi
Amira Chihaoui
Anja Kreysing & Maya Ben Hamed
FYMA
Nicolás Dardano
Nour El Ain Najar
OBK
PONKS
Zeineb Kaabi
CURATORS
Fairouz Nouri
Johanna Baumgart
Khadouja Tamzini
NEXTGEN CURATORS
Maha Ben Hamed
Manar Younes
Nourcine Melitti
DIRECTORS
Aymen Gharbi
Bettina Pelz
LINKS