In Tunis, a mural highlights “invisible” residents

More than 550 people from all walks of life participated over a year in dozens of workshops to create an immense bas-relief of sculpted and painted bricks, installed on a square in the old town, a site protected by Unesco since 1979.

Anne Francey, a 68-year-old Swiss artist married to a Tunisian, bet on a "participatory art project" to reveal the talents of "extremely diverse groups", particularly "the invisible, all these people a little in margins of society or who have disabilities" and that in Tunisia, "we tend not to really recognize or keep hidden".

"Even with a great disability, the child leaves his fingerprints and his signature in his object. He must not say to himself 'I can't': he must live the moment, create soul in the object", explains to AFP, during a workshop, Mohamed Boulila, 52, trainer at the Agim center in Tunis which welcomes young people with motor disorders.

“We have the power to do things despite everything and to show society that we should not only be considered as handicapped,” adds Mr. Boulila, himself affected by this condition, by showing how to transform a brick in a door, window or house.

Educator at Agim for 33 years, Samia Souid, 56, believes that the participation of these young people in a work like “1001 Bricks, the city in all its states” helps them “to express themselves, to say I exist . Because among them there are children who cannot speak but they express their feelings, their ideas.”

In this project where everyone "imagines a metaphorical city", the young people of Agim designed "the city of challenge", "very beautiful bricks that they scraped, sculpted with their own means, for a result very close to "expressions of contemporary art like (those of the American) Cy Twombly", estimates Anne Francey.

After “1001 Hands” a ceramic fresco produced in 2019 in Tunis, “1001 bricks” is still inspired by “A Thousand and One Nights”, “of something that continues indefinitely and of stories that intersect”, explains the artist, supported by Swiss patrons, who chose clay brick for its availability and its wide use in construction in Tunisia.

“More entertainment”

The principle of these “participatory projects” consists, according to Ms. Francey, of “escaping the verticality of artistic know-how, of the great master who draws on the walls while the others fill in pre-established shapes”.

Mixing the creations of "people of all social status", young people in reintegration as well as architecture or art students, it is also "a way of coming together around a constructive project which makes people dream of a harmonious society despite the difficulties the country is going through,” she said.

More broadly, “1001 Bricks” aims to enhance public space while the square where the fresco is installed has suffered many vicissitudes over the centuries, even temporarily becoming a parking lot and a landfill, before a slow renaissance since 2021.

Raouf Haddad, born in this popular neighborhood 42 years ago, comes every day to check the installation of the work and lend a hand. “The whole medina would have to be transformed like this. There are collapsing roofs, walls and alleys where people cannot pass, devoid of public lighting,” he describes.

He instead predicts a similar fate to Sidi Mfarrej Square as Batman Alley, a once-ignored passageway in San Paulo, Brazil that, thanks to street art, has become an international tourist attraction.

For the moment, what matters for Firas Khlifi, 28, community leader of a children's awareness garden about global warming on the square, is that "1001 bricks will attract new projects" in a neighborhood which is full of " of abandoned and unused public spaces.

The fresco "will bring more animation because there are festivals" in the medina every year that could use the square for artistic performances or exhibitions, according to Mr. Khlifi.