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Staging Arts in the Historic City: Development Funding, Social Media Images, and Tunisia's Contemporary Public Art Scene

Staging Arts in the Historic City: Development Funding, Social Media Images, and Tunisia's... In this paper, I examine how public art projects in the Medina of Tunis “stay in the game,” a reference to the (social) media management strategies that projects pursue to attract and keep funding. Following the 2011 “Arab Spring,” revolution, known locally as the thawra, a vibrant public art scene has formed centered in the Medina of Tunis, the highly visible but economically marginalized historic center of the city of Tunis. The formation of this public art scene is due largely to a post‐revolution influx of foreign development funding. The public art scene in the Medina of Tunis, bolstered by social media, has been widely articulated as providing visibility to marginalized communities through participatory methods. I argue that this claim paradoxically obscures the diverse lifestyles and imaginaries of the communities that public art projects aim to benefit. This paradox is rooted in both a history of mediating the historic city as an image of a modern nation, and public art's dependency on foreign funding, which draws it into maintaining foreign neoliberal interests while expressing these interests as essentially local. Meanwhile, improvements in the material conditions for residents of the Medina, expressed in terms of mirtah(comfort), remain elusive. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png City & Society Wiley

Staging Arts in the Historic City: Development Funding, Social Media Images, and Tunisia's Contemporary Public Art Scene

Malachowski, Justin
City & Society , Volume 34 (2-3) – Aug 1, 2022
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29 pages

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Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 American Anthropological Association.
ISSN
0893-0465
eISSN
1548-744X
DOI
10.1111/ciso.12441
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how public art projects in the Medina of Tunis “stay in the game,” a reference to the (social) media management strategies that projects pursue to attract and keep funding. Following the 2011 “Arab Spring,” revolution, known locally as the thawra, a vibrant public art scene has formed centered in the Medina of Tunis, the highly visible but economically marginalized historic center of the city of Tunis. The formation of this public art scene is due largely to a post‐revolution influx of foreign development funding. The public art scene in the Medina of Tunis, bolstered by social media, has been widely articulated as providing visibility to marginalized communities through participatory methods. I argue that this claim paradoxically obscures the diverse lifestyles and imaginaries of the communities that public art projects aim to benefit. This paradox is rooted in both a history of mediating the historic city as an image of a modern nation, and public art's dependency on foreign funding, which draws it into maintaining foreign neoliberal interests while expressing these interests as essentially local. Meanwhile, improvements in the material conditions for residents of the Medina, expressed in terms of mirtah(comfort), remain elusive.

Journal

City & Society – Wiley

Published: Aug 1, 2022

Keywords: Tunisia; Public Art; Development; Revolution; Image

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