In November 2012, the inhabitants of Siliana, a town in northwestern Tunisia, mobilized to protest against the Islamist government and the country’s dire socio-economic situation. A violent crackdown led to the injury of 200 people through the use of tear gas and buckshot. Protesters then decided to leave the city and begin a symbolic exodus, leaving behind the governor in a ghost town.
Originally from Makhar, a city in the same region, Nadia Kaabi-Linke regards this mobilization as a powerful performance. It marks the starting point of her installation, Lahmi (My Flesh), and is based on a series of encounters with victims in 2022, ten years after the Siliana march. Lahmi reproduces the shape of one of the main windows of the Tunisian parliament, which has been closed since July 2021. It speaks of different bodies, all of them wounded: the body of victims, of the state, and the body of the parliament.
Through cracked glass, damaged by the impact of lead, the artist transposes the bodies of some of the victims, which have been scarred by buckshot bullets, to a larger scale. The work reminds us of an evil that continues to silently consume the bodies of citizens and question the country’s culture and collective memory, mutilating some even in their flesh.
