A 3rd edition of the Dream City festival, the 1st after the revolution of 11 January 2011. At a time when artists are being threatened to their very core, can we still dream our world?

Rather than lamenting their fate, the artists taking part in Dream City 2012 are responding to the question of ‘the artist in the face of freedoms’ with their stories and their imagination.

Their participatory, contextualised proposals are a force for struggle and reconciliation in a fractured society. The artists are fighting against all forms of reinterpretation and re-information, one of the privileged instruments of the dominant order.

And many of this year's productions are astonishing in their forms and singularities, playing with the practices of democracy, proposing very intimate moments, operating directly on reality or calling on the audience to participate physically and intensely. In the face of recent violent reactions against the artist and creative activity, artists are showing themselves to be mobile and daring, engaging in approaches that transform the relationship between art and the public in political and democratic ways.

This 3rd edition of Dream City, like its predecessors, gives pride of place to exchanges and reflections in the form of regular meetings with researchers, academics and intellectuals from the humanities and social sciences before the festival, the Remue-Dream.

During Dream City, in addition to the twenty creations specifically for the festival, a dozen works were shown. There was also a rich programme of films at Ciné Dream, as well as literary and musical programmation, not to mention an urban exhibition on billboards across the country. The exhibition was the result of creative residencies by four international photographers (Kourosh Adim from Iran, Kiripi Katembo from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mouna Karray from Tunisia and Li Wei from China).

Dream City 2012 also means 555 direct beneficiaries, including 112 artists, 15 experts (in sociology, urban planning, contemporary art, art in the public space, psychoanalysis, etc.) and 273 young students in the arts, languages and humanities who will be working with the artists in their creative work as volunteer assistants in Tunis and Sfax.

>> Access all the material from the 3rd edition of Dream City 

> Have a look at the Dream City 2012 catalogue in French, English and Arabic.

> See the map of Dream City 2012 in Tunis and the map in Sfax.

> Leaf through the Dream City 2012 press kit in French.

> Read the Dream City 2012 press review.