Photos by JR. INSIDE OUT PROJECT, Tunisia, Pasting in the police station of La Goulette (Tunis) burned during the revolution. On the ground all the Identity cards with photos and fingerprint of the population.
TedPrize winner street artist JR continues to dive right into some of the most tumultuous landscapes to deliver on his InsideOut project of changing the world by postering images of regular people in controversial locations. Now in Tunisia, it’s rocking the Arab world as JR and his troupe of 6 photographers have captured images of 100 regular Tunisian people and wheat pasted massive black and white images in various parts of the country.
According to AlJazeera, JR’s project “is one of the most ambitious contemporary street art projects to vibrate the Arab world. The artwork is about replacing the once all-pervasive presidential photography with mosaics of ordinary, anonymous Tunisians who rose up against their government.
The group are using street art to kick-start conversations and to challenge their compatriots to see the familiar in a new, post-revolutionary, light.”
By bringing the faces of normal Tunisians to controversial locations, this has sparked much conversation.
The project called InsideOut: Artocracy, utilizes the people within each location also. The 6 photographers have partnered with local artists. The images have also sparked significant dialogue among the people, some wondering what this all means, and why, and others arguing that it’s not a good idea. Similar to what happened when JR and his crew canvased the favelas in Sao Paulo and the wall between Israel and Palestine, so too, is his latest stop on this global campaign rocking another part of the world.
According to JR, “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 “
JR hopes that Tunisia will become more open to art and therefore freedom, similar to what happened in Spain after Franco and Berlin after the wall was destroyed.
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 is a 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 H?la Ammar.
Most likely, the next stop for JR’s InsideOut project will be Egypt.
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