We live in a present where regimes of enclosure, extractive economies, and the erasure of evidence reshape law and perception alike. Gaza makes this scale legible: not a “case,” but the seismograph of a total collapse. To begin from Gaza is to refuse euphemisms, to name precisely—genocide, dispossession, siege—and to ask artistic forms not to illustrate but to produce evidence. From here, the architecture of Dream City 2025 unfolds along four axes: evidence; a modal polyphony drawn from the maqams; political ecologies; and persistence as a temporal practice. 

Dream City 2025 is a festival and civic proposition conceived by Jan Goossens in conversation with Selma and Sofiane Ouissi. Rooted in the medina and the public realm, it poses a single question: how do we hold together as facts are erased, civic freedoms contract, and a “slow apocalypse” works on bodies and imaginaries? Dream City operates as a civic platform that connects Tunis to other hotspots by bringing together works, sites, and participants—at the core of a program of in situ commissions for Tunis. 

Gaza, moral epicenter 

Some cities condense history until they become seismographs. Gaza is one: an inhabited place and a memory on fire. The current siege sits within a documented chronology—Nakba 1948, occupation, blockade—in which material destruction also aims at moral destruction: the annihilation of a people’s capacity to think itself. Gaza tests institutions and exposes a “rulesbased order” that collapses as soon as strategic interests prevail. Euphemization, the hierarchization of lives—the symptoms are known. Naming Gaza a genocide is not polemical; it is the duty of precision. This also holds for: collective punishment and planned erasure. 

Tunis, city of resonance 

At a distance, Tunis resonates along the same fault-line. No bombs fall; tremors register the fragilization of freedoms and civic spaces— internal borders emerge and procedures become barriers. Here, Dream City maintains the possibility to speak out where elsewhere it is no longer possible. All this maps an architecture of asphyxiation. 

Moral center of gravity: Palestine 

Palestine is not a “theme”; it is the moral center of this edition. Preopening on 2 October with Tarab, dedicated to dancers from Gaza killed in 2024: pain converted into collective trance. In partnership with Sharjah Art Foundation, artists produce countercartographies—Jumana Manna, Sille Storihle, Sharif Waked, Raeda Saadeh, Basma Al-Sharif—that illuminate a countergeography of Palestinian fractures: memory in action, traces are restored, pacification narratives are undone, resistance shifts towards persistence.  

 Evidence 

Against erasure, art becomes inquiry, archive, and document. In Zifzafa, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, through geolocated recordings and acoustic analysis, shows how the continuous noise of wind turbines on the (occupied) Golan manufactures uninhabitability—sound as material proof of dispossession, “ecology” as a mask for colonization. With La vertigineuse histoire d’Orthosia, Joanna Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige reveal strata of effacement: what an era preserves or forgets speaks the present. In Dignité, Chokri Ben Chikha reactivates the archive of “human zoos” as a tribunal of the present. Resilience Overflow (Lara Tabet) and In Search for Justice Among the Rubble (Public Works Studio)—with the Center for Human Rights & the Arts (Bard College) and Tania El Khoury—show how contemporary violence also targets evidence: erase archives, falsify traces, neutralize justice. 

Polyphony 

At the core of the edition is the modal polyphony of Suni‘a Bisihrika – Créé par ta magie, Premier Mouvement, Tunis (Dream Exhibition), imagined by Tarek Abou El Fetouh. Inspired by the maqams, the fivemovement exhibitionprocess (Tunis, 2025–2027) serves as method. The maqams are not fixed scores but open structures—variation, modulation, improvisation. Adopted curatorially, they affirm a politics of the plural that refuses forced synthesis: polyphony welcomes dissonance; each voice keeps its grain within an unstable accord where discord becomes a competence. The constellation of artists—Mona Hatoum, Walid Raad, Ala Younes, Jumana Manna, Noor Abuarafeh, Etel Adnan, Ali Eyal, Ayman Zedani, among others—shifts archives, recomposes narratives, and interrogates temporalities. 

Political ecologies 

Landscapes, bodies, gestures: archives of domination and resistance. “Ecology” bears a long history of power relations; the environment is archive and battleground. In Magec / The Desert, Radouan Mriziga opposes terra nullius with a fabric of cosmological knowledge. In The Grounding Point, Sonia Kallel maps Mrazig textile as territory and itinerary. With Laaroussa Fragment and Laaroussa Quartet, Selma & Sofiane Ouissi transmit the gestures of the Sejnane potters as memory in action. In _p/\rc__, Éric Minh Cuong Castaing proposes an ecology of shared care, where bodies and care exercise their force to survive. Resource appropriation is a political weapon; countermapping makes visible the conditions for a common life. 

Persistence 

Facing the “slow apocalypse,” persistence is a practice of time: slowing down, holding, celebrating—reconstituting a community that breathes. Tarab responds through trance. Sham3dan (nasa4nasa) and ASSWAT (Cyrinne Douss) deploy slowness and voice as tactics. Dressing Room (Bissane al Sharif) turns the intimate into a stage of struggle. Every Brilliant Thing (Ahmed Al Attar & Nanda Mohammed) proposes lucid joy. Tolon Kè! (Serge-Aimé Coulibaly) inscribes endurance as a common language. Badke (remix) (Ata Khattab & Amir Sabra) says “we are here.” Blue Nile to the Galaxy Around Olodumare (Jeremy Nedd & Impilo Mapantsula) stages a physical poetics where the memory of struggles becomes energy for the future. 

Manifesto 

These axes articulate a memoryinaction against erasure. Creating today is risky; silence is riskier. Silence is not neutrality—it is complicity. We choose to create differently: The city becomes a seismograph. Art produces evidence; to weave the archives of Gaza and Tunis; to link archives, practices, and gestures of resistance. Dream with precision: words that name, gestures that preserve, forms that open the future. 

Long version of Editorial.pdf