The artist Fakhri El Ghezal has published, in partnership with an artistic laboratory, a collection of photos on the town of Redeyef, in the west of the country, in order to make heard the voice of the forgotten in these regions where the unemployment rate is one of the largest in the country.
With our correspondent in Tunis, Lilia Blaise
Residents’ faces burned by years of hard work and resistance, but also a few fleeting smiles… In the black and white shots of Fakhri El Ghezalthe city of Redeyef, 300 kilometers from Tunis, becomes more than a region known for having been one of the sparks of the revolt of the mining basin, in 2008, a social uprising precursor of the Tunisian revolution.
” They are proud people in fact, they were talking to us about 2008, they faced Ben Ali, and this book, it carries this political side a little bit and at the same time Redeyef has a post-apocalyptic side in its settings and everything. You feel that it is a world which does not change and which is in the process of changing. You feel like it’s a world of yesteryear or it could be 2300, you don’t know where you actually are “says the photographer.
” The thing that brought people together there was the mines »
In the photographs, the lack of development and poverty are palpable despite the city having one of the oldest phosphate mines in the country. ” We have a phosphate plain with a path that leads nowhere with an electricity pole where there is no electric wire. These are the old mines “, he adds.
It is through the SIWA collective, a laboratory of ideas in the Arab world, that Fakhri El Ghezal was able to develop this photographic project. A diary, that of a wandering in the city. ” The book shows my landing in Gafsa, the mining basin in Redeyef, and it happened over six years in fact, meeting the young people, the people from there. At the end of the second, third year, I was no longer the stranger, I was part of the decor “says the artist.
Abandoned because of a phosphate industry that is struggling to recover, the town of Redeyef is still linked to culture in a commissary rehabilitated into a cultural center. It allowed the artist to develop his book, now on sale in the capital. The phosphate industry is recovering with difficulty and successive strikes have weakened the sector. Zied Ben Romdhane has also photographed mining towns and recounts this decline. ” The thing that brought people together there was the mines “, he testifies.
Zied Ben Romdhane, photographer