Rafram Chaddad : “I use my Tunisian language to speak about universal things”

Born in Djerba into one of the oldest families in Hara Sghira (the “little Jewish quarter”) and raised in Jerusalem from the age of 2, Rafram Chaddad returned to Tunisia for the first time in 2004 and settled there in 2014. There, he has developed an artistic work on memory, the almost invisible presence of the country’s Jewish history – one of the oldest communities in the world – whose traces he endeavors to reanimate through interventions in the public space inspired by people, rites, objects and materials inspired by the vanished Tunisian Jewish world.

The Jewish population of North African countries, which numbered over 500,000 in the 1940s, has shrunk to less than 5,000 today. Yet the traces of this multi-millennia-old community’s presence remain, notably intangible, in the country’s music, cuisine and culture. It is estimated that between the 50s and 70s, more than 100,000 Tunisian Jews migrated to France and Israel. Many members of this diaspora never returned to Tunisia, but developed a nostalgia for their homeland as a lost paradise – a nostalgia familiar to those who live in exile. In this context, Rafram’s trajectory is disruptive, backward-looking, even transgressive (the previous generation claiming to have turned their backs on their Tunisian past to rebuild themselves elsewhere, in France or Israel, often in difficult ways).

In an essay from the book, scholar Yigal Shalom Nizri speaks of moving from a “metaspace outside the confines of time and space” to daily life in real space. This echoes the title “Comme à Tunis” given to the event at Grand Amour, and the experiences of the children and grandchildren of Tunisian Jewish immigrants, who have often lived in little Tunisias recreated in their grandparents’ apartments or in neighborhoods such as Paris’s Faubourg Montmartre, Belleville and Sarcelles – via cuisine, objects, rituals, beliefs and all the cultural signs perpetuated in exile. At the same time, Rafram’s gesture somehow unfreezes a time that was blocked at the moment of exile. His approach is anything but nostalgia: it’s not a question of reproducing the past, but of reactivating places, objects and rituals in a living, present way.

In this discussion, we talked about how Rafram’s art deals with the disappearance of the Jewish presence in Tunisia – and the impact of current events in the Middle East on his practice in Tunisia – but more broadly of how this artistic work evokes universal issues such as exile, migration, the fragility of borders and the mutability of identities.

Victoria Jonathan: The first question I’d like to put to Rafram is: why did you return to Tunisia, and how did you, coming from a family of religious notables and a traditional community (Djerba) a priori far removed from artistic creation, become an artist?

Rafram Chaddad: My grandfather was a rabbi, because everyone is a rabbi in Djerba. He was also the head of the community in Hara Kebira (the “big Jewish quarter”), and my uncle was the grand rabbi of Tunisia for 20 years. It’s not only that we don’t do contemporary art, there’s also no reflection on culture, unless it’s music that is connected to the synagogue or to the weddings. This is the only part of culture that is allowed even to speak about. My becoming an artist was quite a big move from my family or tradition, although the culture of my family, of my community is super visual, it’s fascinating.

I grew up in Jerusalem, I studied there, I worked in Europe, and then going back to Tunis was almost like a performative thing. Because, first of all, I believe in diversity, as part of Tunisia, and also as part of Judaism. One of the biggest dangers to Judaism, to Tunisia, to the planet, is the lack of diversity, monolithic culture, and especially the division into defined categories. I think that everyone is always trying to go into definitions so we can be superior to others, and things are deleted and go away. 

The work of an artist is not about being nostalgic. It’s not even about history. It’s about the contemporary, about the moment, and when you talk about Jewish Tunisia, even in Tunisia in general, Ya Hasra (an expression in Tunisian dialect meaning nostalgia for the good old days) is the most common word in the language. Everyone talks about the past, instead of dealing with the present. When you are part of this Ya Hasra culture, it is always “it was better, it was better”, and then you’re an artist, and you need to deal with today, or tomorrow, because tomorrow is coming the day after, that’s a big challenge.

In 2014, when I moved to Tunisia, I was still like looking at a poster, a frozen poster of Tunis, reminiscent of Lafayette (one of the old Jewish quarters of Tunis) stories of my mother’s, and of other anecdotes from my family about Djerba, Passover traditions, etc. My grandfather had a publishing house and wrote many books about the history of Djerba. It was all about history and nostalgia until 2014 when I started to get into the picture, and becoming part of it.  

Joseph Hirsch: Your raw material is your family, your personal life, your memories. You’re now a Tunisian-based artist, meaning that you’re both based in Tunisia, and Tunisia is at the center of your work. The idea of return is essential to your work (as brilliantly expressed in Yigal Shalom Nizri’s essay for the book) and you made a piece called «Triadic Memories» which precisely speaks of your move back to Tunisia. It is composed of amphoras commonly used by Djerba fishermen. Can you explain how this piece came together?

Rafram Chaddad: The amphora is a trap to catch octopuses. Octopuses are always looking for dark spaces. The jarush, a kind of vessel, has a hole and you tie a rope between the pieces. There are a hundred jarush here. You put it in the water, the octopus sees darkness, it goes in. This is home. This is where it can be hidden. The octopus thinks that people don’t see it in the darkness. After a few days, the fishermen take the jarush up. The water goes down. It’s very heavy, of course. They take it to the boat, then they go and the octopus doesn’t feel home at all. 

I wrote a letter on each one of the jarush. There’s a Jewish dialect called Judeo-Tunisian. It’s basically Tunisian language with a few variants. It sounds like Arabic but it’s written in Hebrew letters, kind of like Yiddish. In Judeo-Tunisian, I wrote Waqtech Rjat?. It’s connected to a question I was asked in 2004 when I came by boat from Genova to Tunis. I met my uncle, and he asked me: “When did you come back?”

For many Jews, Jerusalem is the place where we’re from. My family has been in Djerba for almost 3,000 years. So Waqtech Rjat? also implies: when did you come back to Djerba? This work was raising the question: “Is home also a safe place? Is it your home? What is home for you?”.

I’m based in Tunis now, but the practice of art, I think, is all about trying to be very connected to what you do in the space where you do it. That’s how you create something more universal. Because I think my pieces are universal more than Tunisian. I use my Tunisian language to speak about universal things. 

Victoria Jonathan: In your work, autobiographical details and anecdotes come face to face with places that have scarcely retained any trace of them. The very form of your works is evanescent: you invest public places (abandoned synagogues, a sand desert, the Souk el Grana in Tunis) for the duration of a performance or installation. Your installations and sculptures require few resources (poor materials such as fishing nets, pieces of ruins, matches, sand, almond bark; reuse of existing objects in the manner of ready-mades) and thrive on the networks of relationships they establish. I would also like to mention the fact that many of the works you do are inspired by people, either family members, Jewish figures in the history of Tunisia (like singers Louisa Tounsia and Asher Mizrahi) or some of the last Tunisian Jews who crossed your path. I would like you to talk a bit about your artistic method, which maybe could be defined as proceeding from the reactivation of places, the creation of interactions with spatial and human contexts, but also the rehabilitation of local know-hows and traditions that are most of the time lost, like a ghostly presence.

Rafram Chaddad : My work is a lot about meeting points. When I made «Sand Taking Over», I went to Metameur, a small, isolated village close to Mednin in the South. My mother was born there, and her father used to fix bicycles in the village. The title of the piece is a nod to the fact that, when you go to these areas, in the South of Tunisia, you see old towns always covered with sand because of the proximity with the desert. It’s beautiful, and it’s also terrifying. In Djerba, for example, if you don’t clean your house every day, it’s full of sand. Djerba is like Sahara Island. Metameur is quite the same thing.

The place where I did the installation is the old synagogue of the village. It was not really a synagogue, because there were very few Jews, all connected to my family. But my mother and her sister Confeta, they used to clean it, and for them the synagogue was kind of a place to play. And they used to dream of going to Djerba. So basically, what I did, I built a small fluka, a boat, and I covered the floor of the abandoned synagogue with sand. I asked a friend of mine from Tunis, who’s an actress, to sing a song from Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, that we actually just had a few days before. It’s a beautiful song. The tune was a Djerbian tune, and I asked men to respond to her. She’s like the leading voice, and they are replying. I wrote my mother’s name on the fluka, Habiba, because that’s what fishermen do. They write the names of their loved ones. It’s usually the daughter or the wife. I did my mother. The fluka was surrounded by a sound work.

People from the village were invited to come. Of course, the police arrived, and I heard them say on the radio: “there is some guy who put a boat inside the old synagogue, we don’t know why”. We basically had the entire village coming in, kids and elders. And it was very interesting, just the fact that they were going in, even without talking about the piece. This piece was about sand taking over life and memories.

Victoria Jonathan: For your piece «Dark Room», you built a black tent in the desert, in Djerba, drawing from a tradition associated to Jewish women from the South of Tunisia. How was it received by the public?  

Rafram Chaddad: We learn a lot from food, from clothes. We learn a lot from material culture about history, about shared life. Jews are culturally very connected to Amazigh people (berbères in French). There’s this old tradition of sending the woman in menstruation to a dark space, a room. Because she’s temporarily not holy, she cannot touch anything. 

I did a very simple action: I just built a tent. I call it «Dark room». It’s related to photography. The dark room is where you reveal, or discover, stuff. It was quite a big tent, almost four meters. You could see it from the road, coming out of nowhere. People were invited to stay, even to sleep there if they wanted. Like a cheap hotel.

It only stayed for a few days, because the neighbors didn’t like it, they thought it was not practical. Art is not practical in the immediate, even if I think art is the most practical work in the world. It is the most effective part of culture, more than anything else, because it stays. But it was not practical for the neighbors, and they kept asking: “What is it for? For sleeping?” I said, no. You can just stay inside. The women from the village were actually happy about it. While the men were very angry, they said they were going to burn it down. Then policemen came and told me: “We have a problem here because these people, they’re going to burn the tent because they think kids are going to have drugs and sex inside.” It was not easy, of course. This kind of work in public space poses problems everywhere. In Djerba, it was quite of a challenge. There was nobody to speak to. An architect was leading the opposition, the coalition against this tent, so we had to remove it. 

Victoria Jonathan: Most of your works only have a very short duration of time. There is an exception with the works you’ve done about the Borjel, the Jewish cemetery of Tunis. It has, I think, more than 20,000 tombs. It’s the biggest in the Mediterranean. The cemetery was built at the end of the 19th century, and since the families left, the tombs are not well kept.

For your show last year, you did quite some work. You almost had a studio in the cemetery, and you were also working with the guardian of the cemetery. Can you talk about some pieces you did about tombs themselves?  

Rafram Chaddad: The cemetery is a trick, because it’s the past, but it’s also the present. In Judeo-Tunisian, we call it Bita Hayim, “the house of the living”, which is very weird. The cemetery originally was in the center of Tunis. It was moved to Borjel, which already had a small cemetery. Then cemeteries from the South also moved to Borjel, mostly from the city of Gabes and small villages around it. My grandparents are buried there. 

There is a water reservoir under Borjel. That’s part of why the tombs look like that, because they’re all moving like waves. I remember once when I was visiting Borjel, seeing these tombs, they almost looked to me like sea waves. I was fascinated by the cemetery, by the idea of things moving all the time. This idea of movement is also connected to a recent Messianic practice where people from Israel want to take their grandparents out of Borjel. The question of home and memory is also related to where the people you love are buried. They’re taking them, so the bones are not resting. This kind of mobility and temporality, in a place that’s supposed to be very stable, was fascinating for me. 

What I did was a voluntary work of building tombs. I started with Fortunée who was a woman I met only once in my life. Her nickname was Touna (a homonym of tuna, a favorite of Tunisians), and I took the liberty to engrave a fish on her tomb.

Touna was the last Jew of Moknin, she had the key to the synagogue, and that’s how I met her. She passed away in La Goulette (a small port city north of Tunis which used to be home to an important Jewish community) at l’OSE, a retirement home for Jewish people. 

I built another tomb for this couple whom I had met in La Goulette. They had no kids, and they had big red teddy bears in their house. The wife used to make me tortellini a la brodo. She was from the Grana community (one of Tunisia’s two Jewish communities, coming originally from Spain and Portugal which their ancestors had fled to establish in the city of Livorno in Italy, before they immigrated to Tunisia in the 17th and 18th centuries; Touensa Jews are the ancient Jewish communities of Tunisia). She made really good Italian food.

You cannot draw animals in a Jewish cemetery. But the rabbi doesn’t go to Borjel, so it’s okay! I made a half teddy bear on each of the two tombs, as a tribute to their home full of teddy bears.

I also played with languages there. Judeo-Tunisian is almost a dead language now. We still speak and write it in Djerba. Especially in WhatsApp groups, to say stuff like “The police is coming” or “Put your helmet”! For Touna’s tomb, I used Judeo-Tunisian, Arabic, French and Hebrew. It was sort of a cynical way to say that this language still exists in the cemetery. Because that’s where things stay. 

Joseph Hirsch: The title of your book, which was also the title of you solo show at B7L9, The Good Seven Years, is a direct reference to the story of Yosef/Joseph in the Book of Genesis (or Bereshit) – a story that figures in the Qur’an too. It refers to the first seven years you spent in Tunisia after you came back. Bereshit, the Book of Genesis, speaks of seven good years that are followed by seven years of misery. One cannot refrain from thinking about the horrible situation we’re stuck in, which of course concerns the Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese people in the first place, but which also impacts Tunisian Jews, in the shockwave of October 7 and the war in Gaza. Your show opened in Tunis at the end of August 2023, and after October 7, the art center received pressure and you were attacked in the media and social media. There’s no point in talking about premonition – although that’s Joseph’s gift –, and obviously the authoritarian drift of the Tunisian regime, which was already pregnant when you started working ont the exhibit, is a reason good enough to express such a feeling. Were you indeed inhabitated by the feeling of an upcoming threat?

Rafram Chaddad: I think I started by talking about the lack of diversity, which is the danger of any society, of any cultural group. Even in Jewish history, when it was more diverse, it was more stable. I didn’t mean that seven bad years are going to come. It was not a program…

The past year was a terrible year. It’s still running. It’s very hard to wake up every morning and to see the news.

As a Jew in the Arab world, as a part of the art and culture world, I strive for the recognition that these cultures are layered. I mean, Jewish culture, Arab culture, Tunisian culture. It seems like this idea has become almost impossible.

It was already hard, as a Jewish artist who also grew up in Israel, to show in the Arab world. But as a Tunisian, I got support from the Kamel Lazaar Foundation. It was a very strong statement for them to talk about reality, not duality.

Things are probably going to be even worse. We all know that. We all feel it. I don’t know. There’s not much to say about such a desperate and heartbreaking situation.