Hello. Welcome. You’ve entered a construction site. We are a group of amateur-museologists, artists, researchers, activists and co-citizens from within and outside of Tunisia. 10 Years after the start of the Revolution, we are working here on the creation of a ‘Counter-Museum of Individual Liberties’. The aim is to create a meeting space where we can think and speak together. What does it mean for each of us, to be free to decide over our own bodies? What individual liberties have been gained over the past 10 years? Which are yet to be gained or have again come under threat?

 

To be honest with you, none of us are sure whether ‘Counter-Museum of Individual Liberties’ is the right name for this project in the making. It doesn’t really sit well. Also, we each have wildly different experiences with personal freedom or the lack thereof. And we all very much doubt that these experiences could ever be captured in a display case. So, how to build a museum that is not some cold and silent freezer of an official past? How to build a museum that lives and breathes and moves together with the people who construct and visit it. A museum that might not even have walls or display cases, the floorplan of which could also include houses, streets, dumping grounds, gardens, sites of resistance, places of memory and places mourning. A museum which collects erased histories, dreams yet to be realised and the most unassuming objects which any state museum would surely be reluctant to preserve.

 

We’re only at the start of a long process that will unfold in various stages in and outside Tunis. At this construction site, we want to share with you some very first proposals, developed over the course of a series of brief workshops. Each of our proposals takes the shape of a kind of temporary installation. Each offers personal and selective insights into questions of freedom, power, exploitation, desires and beliefs. Over a cup of tea or coffee, we would like to hear from you what you think. What should this museum in the making look like? Who do you think should compose its collection? What would you yourself like to display if you were appointed the director of one of its wings? What do you think its name should be?

​

We look forward to meeting you,
Bilel, Bochra, Dorra, Essia, Ridha and Thomas

October 2021.