As part of the festival’s long-term vision, we are honored to announce that curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh joins Dream City—alongside Selma and Sofiane Ouissi and Jan Goossens—for the next two editions, in 2025 and 2027.

Tarek’s curatorial journey with Dream City begins with the development of a new project: Suni’a Bisihrika, or Made with Your Magic. This ambitious exhibition will unfold in five phases across multiple cities and will launch in Tunis during Dream City 2025, with an exhibition and conference. It will culminate in 2027 with a major exhibition and the release of a publication co-edited with Rasha Salti.

Rooted in the deep musical traditions of the region, the project takes its name from a mnemonic phrase used to memorize the eight main Arabic maqams—musical modes that have long structured the sonic and emotional landscapes of the Arab world and neighboring territories, reaching into Central Asia.

The maqams evoke places—Bayati from Iraq, Nahawand from Kurdistan, Hijaz from the Arabian Peninsula—but also peoples and emotional states: Kurd, Ajam, Sikah, and the sorrowful Saba, once called “the weeping of men” in the Abbasid era. More than formal musical systems, maqams carry with them layers of history, displacement, survival, and cultural inheritance.

Suni’a Bisihrika draws on the maqams not only as sonic structures but as vessels of memory and resistance. The exhibition seeks to reflect on the current conditions in the regions from which these maqams emerged—where wars, uprisings, and crises have shaped the lives of artists and communities, and have led to the forced or voluntary exile of many cultural practitioners.

Through a constellation of voices—Walid Raad, Iman Issa, Ala Younis, Noor Abuarafeh, Ayman Zedani, among others—the project proposes a polyphonic reading of the present, grounded in a shared sonic and cultural legacy.

This new collaboration is deeply aligned with Dream City’s vision: to cultivate spaces of deep listening and resonant exchange, where the narratives of the past are brought into dialogue with the urgencies of the present, and where memory—especially sonic memory—becomes a living terrain for transmission, resistance, and collective reinvention.