The WXV Project

WXV asks a simple but essential question: what remains of a revolution? What is left when its slogans become digital archives, its leading figures disappear, go into exile, or are silenced, while systems of power continue in new forms?

The project is built from fragments: incomplete images, interrupted songs, broken stories, and scattered memories. Rather than telling the story of the revolution in a linear way, it brings together the traces that are still alive, revealing a history that is not yet over.

Conceived as an evolving work, WXV can adapt to different spaces, incorporate new materials, and change with each presentation.

Curatorial statement — Residency and issues

WXV originated from a documentary film, Tunisia Clash by Hind Meddeb, and the meeting between the director and the theatre director Mathilde Delahaye. The film footage — clips, outtakes and news reports covering the Tunisian revolution from 2011 to 2014 — gives voice to the rappers who both spearheaded and endured the uprising: popular anthems, judicial harassment, imprisonment. This documentary archive serves as the starting point for a theatrical exploration of the traces and aftermath of an uprising that subsequently stagnated and took a turn for the worse.

The residency aims to transform these archives into a hybrid work combining installation, live performance, and visual exploration. Drawing on the intertwined paths of Weld El 15 and Emino—two contrasting yet complementary figures of the Tunisian rap scene—WXV does not seek to reconstruct a timeline of events, but rather to reveal what remains, what continues to haunt, and what creates divisions.

Through the combination of sound and visual fragments, the manipulation of archival material, and live music, the project creates a dramatic “black hole” where images are distorted, sounds are transformed, and heroic narratives begin to unravel.

The residency has a dual purpose: to develop a stage language that can convey the powerful, multiple voices of rap and personal testimonies, while also exploring contemporary forms of repression, erasure, and radicalization. WXV offers a collective, sensory, and critical experience—not to explain the revolution, but to listen to what remains of it and to feel the fractures it has left behind.

Work carried out during the residency

- Field research and digital documentation: collecting and sorting through visual and audio fragments relating to the project’s key events.

- Material experiments: partial prints, collages, video overlays and sound interventions that juxtapose archives and the present.

- Open workshop: a time for public sharing and discussion with local participants and guest speakers, providing an opportunity to test emerging theatrical and performative forms.

Mathilde Delahaye’s artist residency is a project by OTTO PRODUCTIONS in collaboration with L’Art Rue, made possible by the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.