“Vide-mémoire” is a performance installation made with wire and black light, realized at Kishlat Sidi El Morjani, Medina of Tunis, within the framework of the INTERFERENCE festival 2016.
The memory gradually empties within time, memories dissolve and mingle into the confusion. Only the vestiges prey to oblivion.
The project “Vide – mémoire”, represents a stop over the ruins of the memory of the old library of Kishlat Sidi El Morjani, build by Hamouda Pâcha in 1809.
Located in the old Medina of Tunis, the institution, abandoned today, is dying day by day. Deserted from its books, the library is eaten away by the dust that dissolves its memory.
Through this project, we wanted to revive the memory of a valuable space, sheltering an extraordinary part of our cultural and intellectual old heritage. The space will be rethought and reshape by luminous wire, perceptible to the visitor through a “peep-hole” placed outside the old door, overlooking the street. Provided that the light shows the path to the library of all the books, texts, writings, reflexions and thoughts, straying as ghosts in the space since its abandon. With the remains of books and texts, the luminous lines stretch the past to link the present, extend the interior to the exterior and reconcile art and history.
The performance of the weaving by the luminous lines developed over four days, during which, the spectator was playing the role of the curious, by observing the birth of a memory from its ash, across three peep-holes.
