Africa Is a Country

Remembering Tunisia

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Remembering Tunisia

By
Tom Devriendt

A series of public portraits by the young French-Algerian artist Bilel Kaltoun honors the martyrs of Tunisia's revolution.

Passersby taking in Bilel Kaltoun's work in Tunis, Tunisia (Via the artist).

January 14th, 2012 marks one year since the Tunisian people pushed the country’s despot Ben Ali out of his palace and witnessed him fleeing the country into exile in Saudi Arabia. Today saw thousands of Tunisians come out to the street again, demanding jobs, dignity and recognition of the martyrs slain during the weeks of unrest before Ben Ali’s escape. One of the many moving works remembering those Tunisian citizens that were killed, are the portraits by the young French-Algerian artist Bilel Kaltoun. Three months after the January revolution, he drew some 40 life-sized figures from the victims’ photographs and placed them in and around the streets of Tunis. More pictures of his ‘Zoo Project’ below and on his website (click on the arrows in the right side of the screen to browse).

 

Further Reading

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.