EN
Thmantach Machya ثمانطاش مشية
Dar Meso
Thmantach Machya ثمانطاش مشية is a project of contemplative walks carried out at the intersection of the winding passages of the Medina of Tunis and the archaeological sites of Carthage, conducted within the framework of a residency at Dar Meso. Following research on rural temporalities in the Itoshima region of Japan during the summer of 2024, this new cycle of 18 walks explores a space where time does not flow: it is negotiated, defended, and reinvented.
During this residency in the city of Tunis, walking serves as an act of confrontation. It presents itself as a response to a city that seems to resist a neo-capitalist temporality in which every minute is measured, evaluated, and capitalized. Walking thus becomes a form of resistance: renouncing the speed imposed by the West, refusing the logic of productivity by the step. It is to undermine the currency of the walk. It is, in a sense, walking at $0 per step.
Through my daily wanderings, I approach the places as a manuscript where the traditional motifs of the Medina and the Punic, Phoenician, or Roman traces of Carthage become the narratives of a new truth. Collecting and observing these temporal markers becomes a way of disregarding the dominant flow, allowing for new truths to emerge. The call to prayer, repeated five times a day, notably acts as a ritual clock, a collective breath that structures and soothes time. This rhythm intertwines with urban agitation, which, in its daily repetition, sketches the matrix of a familiar anarchy, almost comforting for those who accept to surrender to it slowly.
Thmantach Machya ثمانطاش مشية thus unfolds as a multidisciplinary installation composed of a narrative of images on engraved clay tablets, photographic transfers on ceramics and stones, sounds, stories, and motifs, each collected along the steps. An invitation to slow down, to listen, to experience the city not as a space to cross and conquer but as a living entity, imbued with contradictory temporalities—where each walk proposes an investment in the self.
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The creation of this work was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts.