IN SITU PLATFORM — Guerret El Anz residency by Roof collective
IN SITU PLATFORM (2025–2028) is a European initiative coordinated by a consortium led by Lieux Publics, offering targeted support to emerging artists working in situ and in public, non‑conventional spaces. Bringing together over twenty partners across Europe, the platform supports projects conceived for atypical sites — with L’Art Rue representing Tunisia and promoting its emerging artists within the network.
Project overview
Among the Tunisian projects selected: the Guerret el Anz project by the Roof collective has passed the first and second selection rounds of the programme’s first cycle (2025–2026).
Its programme of residencies and research is as follows:
- 6–17 April 2026: residency at L’Art Rue
- 11–24 May 2026: residency at Østfold Teater, Kråkerøy, Fredrikstad (Norway)
- 22 June → 2 July 2026: Workspace Brussels
- 20 → 30 July 2026: residency at L’Art Rue
- 3 September 2026: preview in Tunis
Public performances of *Guerret el Anz* will be presented as part of the Focus IN SITU programme at the Fira Tàrrega festival (Tàrrega, Spain), from 10 to 13 September.
Conceived as part of the In Situ programme, these residencies explore the fragility and resilience of Tunisian forms of expression in the face of contemporary tensions: socio-political instability, economic pressures and the forces of globalisation that are reshaping rituals, customs and collective memory.
Guerret El Anz — poetics and stakes
Guerret El Anz, literally “the goats’ cold,” evokes an Amazigh image: a short, penetrating cold snap that announces spring and is said to be harsh enough to test even the hardy goat. The expression becomes a central metaphor for the project — a culture under strain, ritual registers exposed to distorting forces yet sustaining a resilient pulse. The work unfolds as a dystopian fable, attentive to present signs while seeking to preserve and reinvent gestures, sounds and images at risk of erasure.
Positioned at the intersection of choreographic research, site‑specific performance and audiovisual installation, Guerret El Anz uses a collective, cross‑disciplinary approach to show how vernacular forms can be reactivated for contemporary storytelling — not as fixed nostalgia or mere repetition, but as a critical, poetic reworking of local gestures and voices. In this respect, the residency aligns with the ambitions of IN SITU and L’Art Rue: to support site‑rooted works that can engage in dialogue across an international network.
Form and dispositif
Guerret El Anz takes the shape of a choreographic, performative installation: a hybrid dispositif where body, light, image and sound compose a fragmented stagescape that is at once ritual and post‑ritual. The piece stages tensions between presence and absence, memory and alteration, observation and participation.
Credits
- Concept, choreography and performance: Houcem Bouakroucha & Feteh Khiari
- Live sound creation and performance: Rami Harrabi
- Live visual creation and performance: Achref Bettaieb
- Scenography: Feteh Khiari & Achref Bettaieb
IN SITU PLATFORM is a project co-funded by the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme
