2020 ~ Meditations#7 ~ Janine Armin
The following meditation by Janine Armin was commissioned by the Dutch Art Institute on the occassion of Roaming Assembly #27~ Sonsbeek Council #1 Force Times Distance - On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies, convened by sonsbeek 20←24 and Beya Othmani in La Marsa, Tunis on Sunday 8 March, 2020. This record is based on video documentation by Baha Görkem Yalim.
Learning How Spaces of Sex Labour in Tunisia Were Shaped by Colonial Forces and of the Way Labour in the Nile Shaped Music
I did not attend Roaming Academy #27 in Tunis on 8 March 2020 due to my own health concerns related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Travel bans were not yet in place everywhere, and culture workers were tasked with establishing safety protocols. In this crazy situation, two questions that hinged on privilege seemed impossible to disentangle: why stop a transformative event due to unknowns, and why must physical endurance be the price? Given this text is published in 2025 with what we know now about the pandemic’s enormous death toll and ravaging effects of long-term Covid, another two-fold question arises: what have we have learned about our own health, and how have art institutions and the funding bodies that support them changed to care for it? More than 70 art and culture professionals and DAI participants travelled to Tunis where a new reality unfolded around them. As this text has not been updated since its writing in 2020, it does not reflect on these questions, nor current geopolitical conditions and the dire need for an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The day before the assembly Tunisian curator Aziza Harmel, who stewarded the two-week programme in Tunis, gave a gripping introduction on the significance of the place in which the Roaming Academy took place: Carthage. Harmel explained that the capital of Ancient Carthage is located on the Eastern side of the Lake of Tunis, arguably one of the most affluent ancient cities. Developed from Phoenicia in the first millennium BCE, she described its strategic position equidistant between the narrow Strait of Gibraltar that connects the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and which separates Morocco and Spain—just under 15 km at its slimmest—and the Suez Canal, a waterway that connects the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, Egypt to Israel. Harmel commemorated the 3,761 souls lost in the Mediterranean crossing between 2000 and 2017 and drew on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s “residence time” in which “traces of the flesh of the dead slaves remains here now as part of the composition that is the Atlantic Ocean.” Turning to the 2011 uprising in Tunis, Harmel asked attendees to believe in the not yet, and to continue working with the idea that change will happen.
This Roaming Assembly, a programme offshoot that explores themes and practices within the wider DAI programme, was titled Sonsbeek Council #1: Force Times Distance – On Labour and Its Sonic Ecologies [1] and convened by the eponymous artistic platform curators Antonia Alampi and Amal Alhaag with artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and curator and researcher Beya Othmani at B7L9 Art Station, an experimental art space in the rural area La Marsa, Tunis. Times Distance invoked their mutual aim to think about labour, power, time and distance through sound, sharing unheard stories from the most necessary yet hardly represented professions. The Sonsbeek Council took this day outside its Arnhem home to extend its inquiry: guests spoke to how spaces of sex labour in Tunisia were shaped by colonial forces and the way labour in the Nile shaped music, and more, with extraordinary performances by local musicians throughout.
14:30 Introduction: Force Times Distance – On Labour and its Sonic Ecologies by Antonia Alampi, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Beya Othmani
In light of “the difficulties of understanding each other, and different ways of mediating,” Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung introduced the “project about sound” by performing Canadian-Caribbean poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s poem Discourse on the Logic of Language. The poem brings together the force that makes sound and enslaved people’s relation to language, among other critical nuances that I cannot summarise well—I advise that the reader listen to the poet’s own reading and/or read it aloud in full, citational information is included in the footnote. M. NourbeSe Philip begins with the words:
English
is my mother tongue.
A mother tongue is not
not a foreign lan lan lang
language
l/anguish
anguish
—a foreign anguish [2]
Antonia Alampi joined to address the structural lack of representation of invisible labour, looking at fragile and vulnerable histories—in music, textile, clay—as forms without status, urging understanding through what is missing. She also pointed to the need to look at what is in common among cultures to collapse distance, thanking Beya Othmani for opening up a portfolio of artists, musicians and theoreticians—years-long labour that Alampi sought to recognize not extract from, dedicating the talk to oppressed women in honour of women’s day.
15:00 – Music: Saida Manoubia Musical Troupe of Najoua Balti
Musical troupe Najoua Balti officiate hadhra rituals in honour of the thirteenth-century Tunisian Sufi saint Saida Manoubia or Aicha Manoubia in the two shrines dedicated to her in Tunis where visitors engage in possession and trance rituals as healing practices. Here two performers played bendir drums with two others on darbuka drums while the lead singer switched between a bendir and tinnier qraqeb, a kind of iron castanet, adding another percussive layer to the rhythm-heavy event that had adults on their feet as well as a collection of young children.
15:40 Conversation: Iheb Guermazi and Ali Saidane
Cofounder of architecture firm Atelier Spicy Chicken and MIT PhD candidate Iheb Guermazi researches twentieth-century art by Western converts to Sufism. Introducing Ali Saidane, Guermazi remarked on how the renowned Tunisian poet deepened his own understandings of leftism, especially in the 1970s. Saidane has explored popular and national cultural heritage as a poet, but also as a musician and through his television programme Ballade à travers notre patrimoine (2002) that immortalized Berber chanting, excerpts of which were shown throughout the talk. “Sufism in our country is the revenge of three minorities: the women, the black people, and Berbers, because they find in those spaces the freedom they don’t find in social spaces,” said Saidane. For Guermazi this archive of erased voices recalled Arabic’s lack of distinction between sound and voice. “Sound and visibility is the same thing,” said Saidane, mixing senses further. “Years of invisibility led to a period where people forgot about the instruments of visibility: radio, TV. People just decided to make themselves visible on their own.” Some did this through poetry “about the painful life of mining” following the 1913–14 drought that forced Berbers to work in the colonial phosphate mines. Their “natural clock was synchronized with the rain, seasons, time to take the sheep,” explained Saidane. “You can imagine how hard it was for them to adjust to the eight-hour workday.” But poetry as “the language of the people,” said Saidane, “has never been paid labour.” In another excerpt a woman sang about a lover, who needed to “keep [her] love secret” as women were “one above the lowest level in those societies.” It is these voices Saidane has spent a life protecting: “I worked on the excluded. And the woman is considered excluded. But the women have the power to transform their singing into something extraordinary.”
17:10 Talk: Towards a Radio Ballad by Amal Khalaf
As director of projects at Cubitt in London, Amal Khalaf develops art and migrant justice programmes and founded artist collective GCC established in 2013 in Dubai; she has also shown at venues including the Venice Biennale and MoMA PS1 in New York. She hopes the “art CV” will open up to other labour in kind with what she does at the Serpentine in London, directing funds to spaces where migrant organizing happens. In her talk she explained that she is not interested in representation, but what’s possible to do politically. This knowledge is gleaned from her own Singaporean, Bahraini and Gulf background and early family involvement in a migrant support network, providing shelter for domestic workers. On her turn to the music of work, she explained how “work song was used to transform the experience of work.” She played an audio clip of pearl divers’ male voices, clapping and drumming—one of the last groups to play this music called Fidjeri, since the death of the pearl diving industry. Coming from a family of divers, many of whom had been indentured slaves and often dove to their deaths, Khalaf reflected on transitions in the performance of these songs over time. Now “the songs that we sing aren’t about work,” she said. “There is something silenced about how we deal with work.” Khalaf explores this dynamic in the implicative theatre project developed with migrant workers and born of a 2011 response to immigration raids on Edgeware Road, an Arab area of London, which led the group to invite theatre maker Frances Rifkin to develop stories about migrant justice that didn’t require dominant English. “There’s a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard, and knowing you are not being heard, which is noticed only by others not being heard for the same reason,” she said, acknowledging Audre Lorde’s writing on who tells the story and who recognizes it (Echoes, Berlin, 1993). Excerpts from the BBC series Radio Ballads (1958–64) were played in which UK workers first appeared on radio. While she appreciated the potential genealogy of migrant workers who run London, she remarked on the absence of women and few people of colour even though it was made after Windrush. Khalaf discussed a 2019 implicative theatre project recording in which Begonia, coordinator of the Voice of Domestic Workers, spoke of the park as a place to meet, learn, enjoy—but also a place to “suspect those who need our help, and try to get near them and pass them our contact.” That suspicion resulted in the rescue of 83 people from July and February in the previous year, she said. In the background of another recording, a grinding noise accompanied a voice telling us: “They see us like cleaners, or waiters. They don’t think that behind this person doing this kind of job could be some clever person.” Then after some time, the noise disappeared, and the voice could be heard more clearly: “Behind every worker, every person, there is their life.”
17:50 – Talk and Screening: Even the Sun has Rumours by Ali Tnani
Ali Tnani, known for his installation work that examines social issues in post-revolutionary Tunisia, and who also works with computer programming, sound and theory, spoke on his recent transition from conceptual art to something more concrete. In 2017 he began filming buildings that carried Tunisian memories, releasing Even the Sun Has Rumours, his first film in this series. English and French subtitles cross the screen in the 18-minute work that opens on a static shot of a derelict space with a spartan table and neglected but full bookshelf. In French the narrator notes how miners who would have frequented this place, the Economat of Redeyef run by Compagnie des phosphates de Gafsa, with employee vouchers. The subtitles shift between English and French and circuit the disused supermarket that once serviced an area where the main industry is phosphate mining, but whose population continues to suffer from severe poverty. The narrator Taieb, the son of an employee, recounts how he would go there to look at the bikes, guiding the viewer through the space indicating where things used to be.
18:40 Performance and Talk: Izinyanga: Explorations in Creative Methodologies by Thokozani Mhlambi
Thokozani Mhlambi is a cellist, composer and researcher who received his PhD in music from the University of Cape Town. “Contrary to popular belief Africa is such a huge continent,” he said. “The flight from Paris to here is the same distance from Johannesburg to Cape Town in South Africa. (…) As a result we seldom get to interact with parts of North Africa.” Only in December was an agreement made to relieve the responsibility of Tunisians and South Africans to get visas to travel to each other. Mhlambi spoke on the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which started in Cape Town in 2015 and concerned the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on campus grounds with its gaze set north towards Egypt to display the figure’s ambition “to conquer Africa from the Cape all the way up to Cairo.” Students had grown “tired of learning about colonial legacies and they wanted to know more about precolonial legacies,” explained Mhlambi, interested in unfolding this discussion reflected “in the absence of archives.” In doing so he found Izinyanga: “a cluster of crafts that include metallurgy or metalworking but also music composition, stone masonry, the healing arts.” “In this term that collects ideas, (…) from my region of the country,” Mhlambi explained, “I went to the mountains and tried with the sound piece to convey the sense of the landscape, the mountain that runs across the whole of southern Africa, Drakensberg.” The men needed to abstain from sex during these work periods, he said, reminding the audience that there were other kinds of unknown sex corresponding with moon cycles. In the ensuing performance the artist’s voice was a steady beat as he performed behind a sheet so that he appeared in silhouette and hammered down on something invisible. The sound was sometimes human sometimes not and felt arduous to make. A drum and other percussive instruments joined with crackly electronics that became less and less bound by the beat.
19:20 Talk: Sex Labour and the Geography of Sin: A History of the Brothels of Tunis by Iheb Guermazi
Guermazi begins his story in a tavern in the Arab Medina of Tunis on 21 January 1857 in which a quarrel between a Muslim and a Jew lays bare the dangerous cultural misunderstandings of the British and French ambassadors who intercede. Through the complex events that arise from this altercation, Guermazi shows how the misguided understandings of prohibition around the time of colonization in 1881 blossomed into well-defined brothels with registered, controlled and protected sex workers to “moralize the city.” The category of prostitutes, however, preceded the nineteenth century. Guermazi explained that Almahs (young women), for instance, negotiated a different type of sexual practice, folded into songs, dances and poems in homes with food and drink. Intercourse was not guaranteed, and prostitutes spanned social classes. Their locations were known only to clients, which protected them and even if exposed did not require the prostitutes leave town as they “regulated the urban flow of sins within the interior of the Muslim city.” The abolishment of slavery in 1846 in the city impacted this practice as did the “European control over the Mediterranean that stopped white slavery, and the storming of Timbuktu in 1899 that put an end to Black slavery in North Africa.” In 1889 the newly defined category of fille publique required locations be away from schools and military barracks. Muslim theologians claimed the category officiated something prohibited by Islamic law. On the moralization of a city through a spacialization of its sins, Guermazi cited the work of Alexandre Parent du Châtelet on prostitution in 1837, in which the prostitute is necessary urban waste that needs to be cleansed within the “well-defined urban space that is the brothel.” The brothel and mosque became two understandings of morality, Guermazi said, “a Muslim moralism of façade and a colonial hygienic utopia”—two different modernist projects. Only one brothel created by the French colonial authority remains and it is still rejected by Muslim theologians. Adi Saidane reminded attendees that the Sufi saint Saida Manoubia, namesake of the first musical group, was unveiled and walked with men, becoming the saint of prostitutes, noting: “The brothels are each named after saints on streets on which shrines have disappeared.”
20:00 Music: Sidi Ali Lasmar Stambali Group
Sidi Ali Lasmar is an enslaved descendent from sub-Saharan Africa with a shrine in the Medina. The group in his name are the only ones who practice this healing ritual to connect to enslaved ancestors—past divinities they would have worshipped in connection to other Sufis. The cult of spirits that spreads through routes traced between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa called Gnawa in Morocco, Diwan in Algeria and Stambali in Tunisia, bear witness to the history of this therapeutic practice and music. The lead on bendir explained that the first song, all percussion, was the rhythm of women played by women in charge of keeping knowledge on visits to shrines. The tabla, qraqeb and gombri (a stringed instrument) and voice filled the space, before a masked figure with fur draping from the bottom of his tunic began to dance in the crowd of children and adults. After a galloping clamour the gombri struck a calmer dissonant rhythm with the voice coming in only after pensive music. The singer at one point got up, draped himself in a light sky-blue cloth and danced in slow sweeping movements, a star and crescent moon flashing in the patchwork embroidery. He exchanged this with another fabric with two silver birds on a pink background, the dotted line between them perhaps indicating song.
[1] Sonsbeek is curated also by Zippora Elders, Aude Mgba, Vincent van Velsen and takes place in Arnhem every four years. Editorial note: The edition ended prematurely, please see the notice published in solidarity on the DAI website.
[2] See M. NourbeSe Philip, ‘Discourse on the Logic of Language’, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2015). Originally published in 1988 in Cuba by Casa de las Américas. Published in1993 in North America by Ragweed Press (now Stoddart Press) and in the UK by The Women’s Press. Currently published by the author’s own publishing house, Poui Publications. The sound recording is available on the author’s website here, https://www.nourbese.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Discourse-She-Tries-01.mp3.
Read the programme Roaming Assembly #27