Opening: Sunday 13.09.26, 15:00 to 19:00
Co-curators: Hela Djobbi, Salma Kossemtini and Cindy Olohou
First presented at Les Réserves in Romainville, then in 2027 at 32bis in Tunis, the exhibition was born from a collaboration between the two institutions.
Along the route, photographs, videos, sculptures, textiles, archives, objects and everyday gestures compose a landscape of stories in which family histories, memories, migrations, languages, know-how and inheritances intertwine. The artists are less interested in the archive as a frozen trace of the past than in what it continues to produce in the present: what it transmits, what it transforms, what it leaves to disappear.
The works explore the many ways in which memory is built. Some draw on documents or testimonies; others reinvent fragments of history, shift viewpoints, or give room to narratives that have long remained on the margins. All of them question what makes memory: a repeated gesture, a photograph, a material, a transmitted word, a landscape or an absence.
The Mediterranean appears here not as a border or a single territory, but as a space crossed by circulations, displacements and multiple imaginaries. Histories meet there, answer one another, and sometimes contradict each other. They draw a geography made as much of connections as of distances.
Rather than fixing the past, Des gestes de nos mondes invites us to look at the archive as a living material, always open to being reinterpreted. The works do not seek to impose a single narrative; they open a space where different voices coexist, converse and shift our gaze.
With works by:
Alex Ayed*, Ahmed Ben Nessib, Chams Barkaoui, Safouane Ben Slama*, Djabril Boukhenaïssi*, Nidhal Chamekh, Dhia Dhibi, Férielle Doulain-Zouari, Eve Gabriel Chabanon*, Wiame Haddad*, Kapwani Kiwanga*, Wafa Lazhari, Dalila Mahdjoub**, Aymen Mbarki, Fanny Souade Sow*, Bochra Taboubi, Djamel Tatah*, Bochra Triki.
*Works from the collection of the Frac Île-de-France
** Loan from the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA