Gabrielle Goliath

“I appreciate your note on the centrality of bodily presence and situated knowledge, which is key to the political, poetic, affective and conceptual impetus of the work, as it calls us into a different, more relational aesthetic encounter. It is, however, important to recall that not all “bodies” are equal, or equally “believable”, and do not enter into political representation on commensurate terms. An (anti-black/brown/poor/femme) index of differentially valued life continues to sustain an inequitable regime of representation, one in which white heteronormativity reads (and reads well) whilst the “affectable others” (to cite Denise Ferreira da Silva) do not.”

Art Frame Interview read

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Personal Accounts - Salle d’écoute

3-channel video & sound installation
2024

The listening room in downtown Tunis is a space for women to speak and be heard. It’s a comfortable room, without distractions, a sanctuary in the city. There, women find a space in which to share lived experiences of sexual harassment, bullying and other forms of gendered violence, voicing accounts ordinarily silenced or discredited. In this space they are believed and find psycho-social and legal support without judgement or charge.

Recorded on site, the audio accounts shared in this cycle reflect the precaution and self-care asserted by the collaborating survivors, who collectively chose to withhold their names and physical identities. Here, the urgent work of speaking-out is strategically re-routed through femme-centric channels of security and accountability, re-asserting the quieter (but no less radical) political labour of listening.

The Association Tunisienne Des Femmes Démocrates (ATFD) is a longstanding feminist organisation that actively counters legal structures and socio-religious mores that recycle the precarity and diminished life opportunities of women and gender-diverse people in Tunisia. Founded by the ATFD in 1993, the listening room runs five days a week. It is seldom unoccupied.

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Special thanks to the Kamel Lazaar Foundation and the Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates, whose careful facilitation and psychosocial support made this work possible.

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