Artocracy in Tunisia

the new Inside Out project by JR

A few weeks ago Amy posted a piece in the City Beautiful series about Inside Out, the Parisian  artist/photographer JR’s “one wish to change the world” with the help of a $100,000 TED Prize. As a follow up to that piece, I thought I’d share some photos from a recent Inside Out street exhibition in Tunisia where “six Tunisian photographers travelled the country to take pictures of 100 « normal » Tunisians representing the Tunisian diversity: men and women, young and old, from North, South East and West, rich or poor, civil servants, business people, workers, farmers, unemployed, and much more…”

In an email about the project, JR talks a little bit about the importance of this exhibition:

“For the first large street exhibition in a nascent Arab democracy, the posting promised to be surprising and the confrontation with art not always simple. Our first two days were quite hot (insulted in La Goulette the first day, posters taken down in Tunis the second day). So we decided to go to Sidi Bouzid (where it all started), an isolated region, to work with those who did the revolution before coming back to the popular districts of the capital.

“There is nothing better to understand the weight of traditions and the willingness to change than to post big portraits in the symbolic places of the popular districts and try to explain the concept to people nearby…

“And then, we received a warm welcome in Sfax, Sidi Bouzid, Le Kram where men and women (OK, mostly men) have asked questions, challenged the project, raised objections, posted with us, explained the project to their neighbors…

“We come back with hope that Tunisia will become a country open to art as Spain after Franco or Berlin after the wall was taken down.

“Artocracy in Tunisia, an project initiated by Slim Zeghal and Marco Berrebi and created with the group of Tunisia photographers including Sophia Baraket, Rania Dourai, Wissal Dargueche, Aziz Tnani, Hichem Driss and Héla Ammar.”

~ Ariana K. MacPherson

Cities, Cell Phones, and Civil Uprisings

Two posts in the New York Times blogosphere today connect the political upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt with cities and urbanization.  The first, by urban economics demigod Edward Glaeser’s Economix blog, describes how living in close proximity with one another connects minds to breed innovation, productivity…and rioting. The scale that greater density offers can lead to a collective rising up in a way that taking to the streets in lower density areas just isn’t as empowering.

Add to this the explosive rise in cell phones in countries like Tunisia and Egypt in recent years as Andy Revkin points out in Dot Earth and you have rapid-fire connection of political agitators with the technology and incredible ability to quickly organize the masses to action.

Amy

Building New Cities in the Desert

Today the New York Times featured a fascinating article, photo sideshow, graphics and interviews with architects on new cities being built in Saudi Arabia, titled: Laying Out Cities, Saudis see Window to Modernity.

The article discusses not only the architecture and urban planning challenges of constructing such cities in the deserts, but also the religious and political implications of constructing cities have the potential to allow women to more freely mingle with men and foster other “liberal” activities.  Also as a billions of dollars are being spent on these cities many people, Saudi citizens and international observes alike, are upset that other areas of Saudi cities have deteriorated into slums.

Enjoy a few photos and quotes below and read the whole piece from the New York Times.

King Abdullah Economic City, [is] a 65-square-mile development at the edge of the Red Sea. With a projected population of two million, the city is a Middle Eastern version of the “special economic zones” that have flourished in places like China.

Architecturally they couldn’t be more dreary and conventional — bloated glass towers encircled by quaint town houses and suburban villas decorated in ersatz historical styles. Their gargantuan scale and tabula rasa approach conjure old-style Modernist planning efforts like the creation of Brasília in the 1950s or the colossal Soviet urban experiments of the 1930s, but these are driven by anxiety over the future, not utopian idealism.

With more than 13 million Saudis — half the population — under 20, the 86-year-old Saudi ruler, King Abdullah, is trying to create more than a million new jobs and 4 million homes within 10 to 15 years.

“Here you have a long historical pattern of settlement,” said a local architect, Tariq Alireza, expressing a frustration I encountered again and again here. “There is an inordinate amount of vacant land. Why not solve our problems? Why not fix the port in Jidda?”