Yasmine Ryan of Al Jazeera reports on the excitement, debates and struggles of “Inside Out: Artocracy in Tunisia”.
Marco Berrebi, a Tunisian photographer who has worked closely with JR on several of his previous projects, says that Artocracy is about giving people the freedom to debate the photographs and to come to their own conclusions.
“After 50 years of silence, people are willing to discuss, to talk, to challenge your ideas,” says Berrebi, who had long hoped to bring this type of street art to his home country. “If people want to tear them down, or write something on them, that’s part of the project, that’s okay.”
Indeed, the group’s message of tolerance and the celebration of diversity has been met by lively debate wherever they have gone.
[...] While some of the younger men voiced their opposition to the images for religious reasons, many older men were vocally supportive of the art.
Yet many of the portraits were quickly taken down by men who argued they were too close to a mosque.
In the flux of Tunisia’s political transition, everything is contested after decades of imposed silence.
As the Artocracy project shows, public art is no exception.
“This discussion is sound and we should have this discussion, because that’s how we can prove Tunisia is a free country,” Berrebi says.
