Stop motion
In a land not so far away (ep. 1)
April ’26 – A visual exploration that asks what Southern Tunisia's landscapes are made of. Presented during the first edition of the Specters of the Undercommons Conference in Cairo, Egypt (AUC), held by Studio of the Extra-Territorial.
« Between the troglodyte caves and the stone houses, steel frames stand idle, sometimes crowning solitary columns, other times piercing through flat roofs, with no sign of any ongoing construction work. The slender rods are covered with protective industrial bricks, signs of hanging futures carrying the promise of dwellings yet to come and the hope of return »
Info
Original footage: KHAM studio, Tamezret (December 2024)
Conference: Specters of the Undercommons, 15-16 April 2026. Studio of the Extra-Territorial.
In a Land Not So Far Away (episode 1) is a hybrid essay, part of a broader visual ethnography that weaves together historical, contemporary, and speculative fragments into a living assemblage. It traces the layered memorial strata of present-day Southern Tunisia, from the gradual abandonment of its troglodyte villages, through the uncanny grafting of Star Wars’ science-fictional imaginary onto their millennial landscape in the late 1970s, to the return of mountain dwellers’ descendants, mending postcolonial scars and reclaiming ancestral lands through new, hybrid ways of inhabiting them.
In the stop-motion, the depiction of these acts draws on the science-fiction imagery associated with Dahar’s identity (beams so bright they dazzle even in broad daylight!) to embody the inhabitants’ attempts to tether to the earth and the sky… to cosmogonies reborn.
Vulgar steel rods become sacred bridges, linking the past and the future in a continuum. The choppy rhythm of the stop-motion and the flickering, fragile lights, tell the tentative march towards the origins, a journey that’s not without pain or friction when distance in time and space becomes an alienation.
« What does it mean to return and reclaim the land of one’s ancestors? How can one heal the wounds of departures made without a farewell? »
Here is a palimpsest of the Dahar, deliberately kept in a state of tension, mindfully dealing with identities that try to coexist simultaneously without seeking to forge a false narrative cohesion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oTurM7gESE