Dream City x KANAL-Centre Pompidou
After intense editions in Tunis in 2022 and 2023, Dream City will be on the move in 2024. From April 4th through 13th we’ll make a first impactful and long-term stop in Brussels, at the invitation of KANAL-Centre Pompidou. Contextual performances, concerts, films, videos and cultural and political talks, with artists such as Selma and Sofiane Ouissi, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Bouchra Khalili and Jupiter, will create once more an open and shared space for artists, thinkers, and activists, in which the burning questions and turbulent topics connecting and dividing Tunisia, the Global South and Europe, will not be avoided. How to make and be a festival differently, how to put artists at the heart of a city, its tensions and populations, how to take risks and dare to be vulnerable in a cultural world that is ever more prudent and silent: after more than ten editions of Dream City in Tunis, Marseille and London, this is what we now will bring to Brussels and the heart of Europe.
You are warmly invited, join us as much as you can!
> The full programme is available here:
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Programme Poster 3 > 14 April 2024 | Agenda 3 > 14 April 2024 |
> Discover the artists & collaborators:
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Heba Y. Amin, Jalila Baccar, Ismaïl Bahri and Youssef Chebbi, Fakhri El Ghezal, Malek Gnaoui, Bouchra Khalili, Mouna Karray, Filipe Lourenço, Radouan Mriziga and Sondos Helhassen, Rabih Mroué, Selma and Sofiane Ouissi, Samaa Wakim and Samar Haddad King, Winter Family, Jozef Wouters, and many others!
> Find the programme on kanal.brussels and below:
▪ Videos from Dream City (Screening Installation)
Presentation of video installations of artists Heba Y. Amin, Ismaïl Bahri and Youssef Chebbi, Fakhri El Ghezal, Mouna Karray, Malek Gnaoui, Bouchra Khalili, and Rabih Mroué. Continuous screening after each show.
Thursday, 4 April, 2024 - 17:00 — Saturday, 13 April, 2024 - 23:45 - K1
▪ LOSING IT, Samaa Wakim & Samar Haddad King (Performance)
What if you grew up in a war zone? How does that impact your identity?
“Can you still hear the bombs? I can hear them.”
What if you grew up in a war zone? How do you cope as a child when you are exposed to political conflict on a daily basis?
The choreographer and performer Samaa Wakim grew up in the occupied Palestinian territories. During this solo dance performance, she asks herself how these experiences impact her identity. Through movement and sound, she remembers her youth and the imaginary world she created in order to survive. Driven by her own sounds and live music by Samar Haddad King, she goes back and forth between fear and hope, between sounds that used to scare her and sounds that used to bring her comfort.
Thursday, 4 April, 2024 - 19:00 - Kaaistudios. Rue Notre-Dame-du-Sommeil 81, 1000 Brussels
Friday, 5 April, 2024 - 19:00 - Kaaistudios. Rue Notre-Dame-du-Sommeil 81, 1000 Brussels
▪ À LA RECHERCHE D’AÏDA, Jalila Baccar (Theatre)
Jalila Baccar is one of the leading women playwrights and performers in Tunisia and the Arab world. At Dream City she gives a theatrical reading of À la recherche d'Aïda, a text that is as relevant today as it was when she wrote it in 1998.
In the text two women, one Tunisian and one Palestinian, share personal stories. Their conversations are structured around a series of key dates in Palestinian and Arab history from the displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba in April 1948 to the signing of the Oslo Accords, a series of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in September 1993. As they share their experiences and sorrows, the voices of two women become one story connected by persistent refusal of suffering, humiliation, and injustice.
Thursday, 4 April, 2024 - 21:00 - K1
▪ THE TEMPEST SOCIETY, Bouchra Khalili in conversation with Joachim Ben Yakoub (Projection Discussion)
The Tempest Society is neither documentary nor fiction, but rather a hypothesis. Three Athenians from different backgrounds form a group to examine the current state of Greece, Europe, and the Mediterranean. They get together on a theatre stage that is being used as a public space. They call themselves The Tempest Society in tribute to Al Assifa ('the tempest' in Arabic), a theatrical troupe consisting mainly of North African immigrant workers and French students with North African heritage that was active in 1970s Paris. Al Assifa used the format of a ‘theatrical newspaper’ to communicate the everyday struggles of immigrants against inequality and racism in France. Forty years later, Al Assifa’s legacy is being revived. On a theatre stage, the Tempest Society and their guests call for equality, a sense of citizenship, and solidarity.
The film is followed by a conversation with Bouchra Khalili and Joachim Ben Yakoub.
Friday, 5 April, 2024 - 20:30 - K1
▪ DAGHT JAWI, Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Performance Reading)
Listening to a soundtrack of violence on a daily basis.
For one year, Lawrence Abu Hamdan kept a diary of the sweltering skies above Lebanon. During the same period, he made more than 40 videos of Israeli fighter jets and other unmanned aerial vehicles. Using this material as well as live audio, he recreates the atmosphere of this roaring sky in the Brussels planetarium. A performance evoking life under the sounds of violence, under a sky that is continually changing. From imminent danger to relative calm, from free to occupied, from something that can be ignored to fatal.
Saturday, 6 April, 2024 - 19:00 - The Brussels Planetarium. Av. de Bouchout 10, 1000 Brussels
▪ H2HEBRON, Winter Family, Ruth Rosenthal & Xavier Klaine (Theatre)
A street serves as a crossroads of various narratives and fates.
H2 is the Israeli-administered area in Hebron, the most populated Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank. It is “sterilized” according to the terminology of the Israeli army, that is to say emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants to “protect” a few families of ultra-radical Jewish settlers. A zone where destinies and narratives intersect, juxtapose and clash in a violent and absurd microcosm.
This work began in 2017 when Ruth Rosenthal contacted her childhood friend S. who had become a settler in Hebron, in order to record some long interviews. Winter Family then decides to extend this research by meeting those who frequent this neighborhood: Palestinian residents, resistance fighters and political leaders, ultra-Zionist Jewish settlers, Israeli soldiers, international observers and activists...
They all describe their H2 zone by telling their history, their stories, their myths, their texts, their massacres and their laws.
They speak the city and their too radical lives, chosen or subjected, in the shadow of the Tomb of the Patriarchs / Ibrahim Mosque and the feeling of exaltation or exhaustion generated by an unjust military occupation, increasingly violent and that persist. Manipulating a model, an exact replica of the area, Ruth Rosenthal guides us through zone H2 by transmitting these dramatic testimonies.
Saturday, 6 April, 2024 - 21:00 - K1
Sunday, 7 April, 2024 - 21:00 - K1
▪ DREAM CITY: A DIFFERENT FESTIVAL (Talk Performance)
Dream City is a multidisciplinary biennial arts festival that invests the informal spaces of the medina of Tunis, founded in 2007 by Selma and Sofiane Ouissi. The festival addresses and deals with the social and political realities of Tunis in a fragile global context.
Dream City is distinguished by its unique methodology: inviting Tunisian and international artists to invent and create contextually by engaging with the city and its inhabitants, accompanying the invited artists and offering them a long period of creation.
Themes such as migration, democracy and citizenship, living together, human rights, but also issues related to governance, environmental crimes and memory are at the heart of the project.
Besides the panel discussion, the programme of Dream City: A Different Festival also includes two performances by Filipe Lourenço and by Jozef Wouters. Your ticket gives you access to the entire afternoon.
Sunday, 7 April, 2024 - 14:00 — 18:00 - Decoratelier. Rue de Manchester 17, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
▪ PULSE(S) IN SITU, Filipe Lourenço (Dance)
A solo dance performance driven by the pulsating rhythms of ritual dances.
Pulse(s) in Situ is an adapted version of the 2018 dance solo Pulse(s) for non-theatrical spaces. Filipe Lourenço created amongst others a version op maat for the Medina, Tunis’s old city centre. Argentine, Touareg, and Alawi ritual dances from Lourenço's ancestral cultures are the starting point.
In a sober and musical choreography, he strips the dances of their decoration until only the essence remains: the pulsating rhythm that underlies their ceremonial power.
Sunday, 7 April, 2024 - 15:00 - Decoratelier. Rue de Manchester 17, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
▪ THE SOFT LAYER, Jozef Wouters (Performance)
Can renovation also add layers rather than just remove them?
This performance is a continuation of The Soft Layer (Tunis), a site-specific work that took place from 2017 to 2019 in the historic building of Dar Bairam Turki in Tunis, as part of Dream City. Over several years scenographer Jozef Wouters collected stories and ideas from the inhabitants of the building. Inside its courtyard a group formed of young architects, neighbors, actors and one science fiction writer.
Together, they undertook the renovation of the beautiful 17th century Ottoman palace. A different kind of renovation, one that doesn’t remove but adds a layer—a soft and temporary layer made of collective memories, stories and opinions about the building. Part of the work was a text that turns the building into a score, to be read at sunset as an act of care and a collective meditation on a building. If the past is the only imaginable future, then where are we now?
At the invitation of KANAL, Jozef Wouters will restage the text of The Soft Layer in the courtyard of Decoratelier in Molenbeek. Four local actors will come together for one day to learn the original score by heart, helped by Decoratelier’s team of constructors, who will rebuild parts of Dar Bairam Turki as mnemonic devices for the performers to recall their text and imagine the building.
Sunday, 7 April, 2024 - 17:00 - Decoratelier. Rue de Manchester 17, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
▪ WAJDAN, Selma & Sofiane Ouissi (Screening)
For the Wajdan project, Selma and Sofiane Ouissi directed five women artists living in Tunis, Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Brussels and Sao Paulo remotely.
Filmed at home by their mobile phones, they respond to the voice of Wajdan, a Syrian political refugee living in France. A film full of humanity, about social relationships and the role of artists during times of crisis.
Selma and Sofiane Ouissi are fascinated by the human condition and what drives everyday relationships. Wajdan was commissioned by Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. The story of this Syrian refugee was also part of their other project Le Moindre Geste.
Tuesday, 9 April, 2024 - 20:00 - K1
▪ The Arab World, Africa And Europe In The Light Of The Gaza Tragedy: Is A Common Future Still Possible? Sophie Bessis, Wahid Ferchichi & Samaa Wakim (Talk)
For many years the relationship between the South and North shores of the Mediterranean have been under increasing pressure. Schengen-related visa-issues; dramatic migration deaths in the Mediterranean, related to the exportation of European migration policies; and now the continuous and unfolding tragedy in Gaza.
Which future can we still imagine and construct together? Which role to play for Europeans out of Brussels and for Africans and Arabs out of Tunis and the entire MENA-region. Together with key-thinkers and activists from Tunis and Brussels we will reflect on these complex issues.
Panel discussion with Sophie Bessis, Wahid Ferchichi and Samaa Wakim.
Wednesday, 10 April, 2024 - 20:00 - K1
▪ BIRD, Selma & Sofiane Ouissi (Performance)
A quiet plea to take care of all living things.
A magic square, a dancer, and two birds. Bird invites us to reflect on our relationship with all living things. How can we consciously share a space together? What are the consequences of this togetherness? What ‘ways of being’ are being created? Can interaction be a starting point for a choreography?
Dancer and choreographer Sofiane Ouissi moves across a geometric square, taking account of the other bodies that are moving through the same space. He embraces an encounter with two birds, without trying to control or tame them. Large gestures are unnecessary, receptiveness is found in the little things: the sound of flapping wings, in heartbeats that engage in dialogue with each other.
Thursday, 11 April, 2024 - 19:00 - Mercerie. Rue de Vergnies 2, 1050 Ixelles
Friday, 12 April, 2024 - Mercerie. Rue de Vergnies 2, 1050 Ixelles
Saturday, 13 April, 2024 - Mercerie. Rue de Vergnies 2, 1050 Ixelles
▪ AYUR, Radouan Mriziga & Sondes Belhassen (Dance)
A solo dance performance that gives voice to the Carthaginian moon goddess Tanit.
This is the second part in a trilogy by choreographer Radouan Mriziga focusing on the knowledge of the Amazigh, the indigenous people of North Africa.
Ayur is a solo dance performance by Sondos Belhassen, inspired by the ancient Carthaginian moon goddess Tanit. As a guardian of long lost wisdom, she dances in and through a special dome and recites texts by poet Lili Ben Romdhane and rapper Mahdi Chammen.
In a silver-coloured, fine-spun network of dance, text, and architecture, she evokes the past and simultaneously looks to a more inclusive future.
Thursday, 11 April, 2024 - 21:00 - K1
Friday, 12 April, 2024 - 21:00 - K1
▪ DREAM CITY: CLOSING NIGHT (Party)
A closing party with Benjemy and Jupiter & Okwess.
The six-member band Jupiter & Okwess features a mix of afropop, funk and rock. Frontman Jupiter Bokondji and his band collect Congolese rhythms and melodies by the dozen. Just ask Damon Albarn, Money Mark and Ana Tijoux.
Benjemy is one of the most acclaimed DJs of the Tunisian underground scene. In his sets, he effortlessly mixes traditional music and poetic lyrics with uncompromising electro.
Saturday, 13 April, 2024 - 21:30 — Sunday, 14 April, 2024 - 02:00 - K1