Immersive Art in Tunisia

People are often surprised that Tunisia has a new media art scene. It does, it is roughly a decade old, and it was assembled mostly without institutional infrastructure. Understanding how it was built explains what the work looks like.

The founding gesture is INTERFERENCE. Launched in 2016 in the Medina of Tunis under the curatorship of Bettina Pelz and Aymen Gharbi, it is the first light art festival on the African continent. Works are installed across sites in the historic quarter, so the architecture is not a backdrop, it is the material. There is no black box, no controlled venue, no permanent technical infrastructure. Each edition is assembled, run and taken down by a largely volunteer team.

That constraint produced a specific competence. Artists here learned to work with the building they were given, in conditions nobody could fully test in advance. We contributed across two editions, providing interactive technical support to exhibiting artists, training, and visual production. The training part is not incidental. In a scene without schools dedicated to this practice, the festival is where the transmission happens.

The second thread is curatorial rather than technical. Aymen Gharbi also co-directed the alternative edition of the Journées Musicales de Carthage in December 2021, which moved the festival out of the concert hall and into four sites of the Medina for one night walk. Each piece there came out of two residencies at the Hammamet Cultural Centre, designed specifically to make visual artists and sound artists work together. That format, a residency producing a site-specific audiovisual piece, is how a lot of the good work here gets made.

Institutional support exists but arrives through open calls rather than through commissions. The Kamel Lazaar Foundation runs one, and its B7L9 Art Centre gives selected projects a real venue. That is the route that produced Between Frequencies with DAWAN in 2022, a work on information saturation where our contribution was a holographic mapping on tulle in a blackout room, generated from Tunisian television archives and data-driven particle systems.

Geography matters more than it should. Bhar Lazreg, on the northern edge of Tunis, has become the density point: Collectif La Ruche, Studio B3, B7L9. Le Monde Imaginaire in May 2025 and SPECTRUM in May 2026 both happened there, a year apart, under the same curator. A scene needs a postcode before it needs a budget.

The state shows up at scale rather than continuously. The XVIII Francophonie Summit in November 2022 put an interactive installation inside a former olive oil mill at Djerba Explore, with dome projection, sensors, DMX and nine microphones. Those moments are real and they fund real production, but they are punctual. Nobody builds a practice on summits.

What follows from all of this is a working culture rather than a style. Artists here are used to hybrid roles, because there is rarely a separate technical director to hand the problem to. They are used to building for buildings that were not designed for projection. They are used to documentation being the weakest part of the chain, which is a genuine problem: a great deal of strong work exists with almost no trace online, which makes it invisible to curators searching from abroad.

If you are programming from outside Tunisia, that last point is the one worth knowing. The absence of a searchable record here is not an absence of work.