Triadic Memories

Triadic Memories is a series of site specific installations in southern Tunisia, located between Djerba and Medenine, featuring video, sound and sculpture. It explores the subjects of leaving and returning, the ways in which we define the concept of home, as well as reflections on isolation. This exhibition is Chaddad’s first major series of artworks in Tunisia, and consists of four installations: Triadic Memories, Sand Taking Over, Mandra, and Dark Room. 

Co-curated by Katherine Li Johnson and Philip Van Den Bossche
Texts by Katherine Li Johnson
Production by Nour Amrani

Triadic Memories, 2022

Triadic Memories (2004), aspect ratio 16:9, 2:52 minutes, one video projector, amphoras, paint, fishing rope

Lalla Hadria Museum

https://maps.app.goo.gl/vcGRtAzWMAgAGKYm6

Preceeded by anti-Semitic pogroms of the late 14th century, the expulsion of Jews from Spain was prompted by the Alhambra Decree in 1492; at this time, Chaddad’s paternal family left Gibralter for Algiers, and took part in the Andalusian Jewish and Muslim migration through North Africa, eventually settling on the island of Djerba, where they would build the Jewish ghetto of Hara Kbira in the beginning of the 15th century. This new Jewish settlement was built six kilometers away from the historical Jewish community of Hara Sghira, where Chaddad’s maternal family resided for millenia. 

Tensions against Jews in North Africa rose in the 20th century, which led Chaddad’s family to migrate from Djerba to Jerusalem the late 1970s; young Chaddad left his birthplace for what became four decades, leaving one home to take root in another, and participating in a pattern of migration and settlement common in the Jewish community. Since his return to Tunisia at the age of 39, Chaddad is routinely greeted by non-Jewish Tunisians with the phrase, “Welcome to Tunisia.” In Triadic Memories, Chaddad responds, and gives space to the powerful question posed to the Jewish diaspora by those that perceive themselves to be indigenous, whether in Djerba or Jerusalem: “When did you come back?”

Situated in a reconstructed pottery workshop, a jarroush, or mound of traditional clay amphoras, are connected by dolly rope and painted with the aforementioned question, “When did you come back?” written in Chaddad’s mother tongue of Judeo-Tunisian, “וקטאץ רזאעת,” and pronounced “Waktech rjat?” The interior of each amphora is painted black, mimicking a technique used by Mediterranean fishermen to catch octopi, luring them into a compact, dark space resembling the natural coves and coral where the species finds refuge and desired territory. As migratory animals, octopi are seduced by the safety of the amphoras, and settle into a deceptive trap that is fabricated to feel like home. Triadic Memories (2004), a video created by Rafram upon his first return to Djerba since leaving home as a child, is projected on a wall behind the collection of amphoras.

Sand Taking Over, 2022

Wooden boat, paint, sand, four speakers, audio work ‘Shoef Kemo Eved’, 3:28 minutes

Dropped pin

https://maps.app.goo.gl/srX2TbSL75KCuABy6

Located in the old synagogue in Metameur, Sand Taking Over is a site-specific participatory installation reflecting on the artist’s matrilineal oral history and memories of a synagogue left abandoned shortly after the Six-Day War of 1967. Chaddad’s maternal family migrated from Djerba to Metameur in search of economic opportunity, and resided in the town for the first six years of his mother Hbiba’s life. Desert sand covers the synagogue floor that Hbiba cleaned while dreaming of her ancestral island of Djerba; while women were typically banned from the main service in synagogues, an exception was made for Hbiba since she belonged to the only Jewish family in the village. She recalls a childhood filled with prayers and hymns echoing through the synagogue.

The piyyut, or poem, Shoef Kemo Eved, the liturgical Hebrew New Year chant written by the 11th century Andalusian scholar and poet Shlomo ibn Gabirol, loops on four speakers in the synagogue’s periphery. This call and response hymn is led by Myriam El Ferjani, a Tunisian actress known for starring in the critically acclaimed film La Belle et la Meute; her sweet, childlike recitations emerge from the synagogue’s eastern corner, reserved for the chorus leader, and are echoed by the cacophony of an all-male choir. This audio work presents the feminine in place of the masculine cantor, and reverses the status quo of the power dynamic between men and women in Djerbian society at large. 

A replica of a flouka, a small wooden fishing boat, named after Chaddad’s mother Hbiba, sits in the center of the sea of desert sand engulfing the synagogue’s floor. Installed kilometers from Tunisia’s southwestern coastline, with a bed of desert sand taking the place of its natural home at the shore, the flouka denotes Chaddad’s family history, referencing their relationship with displacement and questions of belonging. Due to its proximity to the Sahara, the synagogue lies in an area at extremely high risk of desertification, reminding the viewer of Metameur’s consequential inhabitability, and calling attention to the risk of erasure, lost memories and forgotten heritage when faced with the inherent traumas of intergenerational displacement. 

Visitors are asked to remove their shoes before entering the synagogue, and invited to sit in the flouka and listen to the liturgical hymn, Shoef Kemo Eved.

Mandra, 2022

Video installation, aspect ratio 4:3, length 1:10 minutes, one video projector

Lalla Hadria Museum

https://maps.app.goo.gl/vcGRtAzWMAgAGKYm6

A mandra is a circular surface over which seeds and grains are threshed to remove the husk; in Djerbian society, the task of husking is assigned to women at home. This video work considers the historically invisible nature of women’s labor in the household, and how society has valued the role of women over time. While the development of automation and contemporary conversations about uncompensated labor are reframing the organization of socially reproductive labor in high income societies, for most of history, we have categorized socially reproductive work as women’s work: the challenges of work are the challenges of the home, and the challenges of the home inescapably fall on the shoulders of women.

This stop-motion video removes the laborer; barley and lentils move around the mandra directed by an invisible hand. The grains are miraculously kinetic without the visible effort of a person performing any task: labor is performed in the absence of a waged laborer. The grains are joined by a shefshari, the Judeo-Tunisian pronunciation of safsari, a traditional veil made of white silk or cotton. Typically worn by women, the shafshari serves as a traditional covering for women’s bodies, similar to the historical  function of the Indian saree, said to have been brought to North Africa from Kerala by Jewish olive oil and spice merchants in 7th or 8th century Mahdia. The shefshari shown in this video belonged to Chaddad’s late paternal great-grandmother Woukhiya Chaddad of Hara Kbira. 

At the beginning of the video, a man is shown cleaning up at the grains with a broom and dustpan, performing compensated labor for which he is credited. 

Credits: Kamel Chater as male cleaner.

Dark Room, 2022

Wooden sticks, fabric, rope

33°49'50.0"N 10°51'05.8"E

https://goo.gl/maps/vaP5g6Wg3VEh4gHL8

Dark Room reflects on the historical experiences of Jewish and Amazigh Djerbian women during niddah, the Hebrew term for menstruation. Up until the early 20th century, in the artist’s hometown of Hara Sghira, women were secluded in a room in their family home for the duration of their menstruation; daily tasks were put on hold due to their perceived impurity, and replaced with days of confinement and isolation. This period of isolation concluded with the performance of a ritual cleansing at the mikveh, a bath located in each Jewish household, where a woman’s monthly routine of seclusion and purification would come to an end.

In an article for Apartamento Magazine written in 2020, Chaddad considers his personal experience with isolation by recalling his time in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison in 2010: “...after days of physical and mental torture…sitting in a 2x2m cell, I had no way to write or read, no one to talk to…there was only me and my thoughts, without knowing when it would all end…I learnt that it’s easier to have inner thoughts when you’re alone…and not only without people, but alone without any triggers that push you to think outside of yourself.”

Drawing from reflections on both community-enforced isolation as ritual, and solitary imprisonment as isolation, Chaddad’s work Dark Room speaks to the universal anxieties of solitude and frames its relationship with extrinsic reward. He presents the viewer with the safety of voluntary aloneness: each participant is invited to enter a black tent situated in an olive grove in Djerba, close to his hometown of Hara Sghira, to reflect, meditate, and dream, experiencing the anticipation of ritual purity and prompting each participant to consider the inevitability and necessity of isolation in its varied forms.

This process of isolation, whether expansive or narrow, is productive of confusion, conflict and sorrow. Isolation can never give birth to aloneness; the one has to cease for the other to be. 

-Krishnamurti