Younes BEN SLIMANE

To experience Younes Ben Slimane's works is to expose oneself to the uncertainty that their indeterminate nature engenders. As stratified mixtures of documentary and fiction, they are hybrids of films, installations, and constructions. His works demarcate complex, sensitive, and overturned geographies; they are poems composed almost solely of images. They freely combine points and narratives in space and time to compose material histories at the edge of the visible. After studying architecture and film, this Tunisian artist produced works conceived as spaces, areas to be surveyed which then unfold physically, visually, patiently over time before the eyes of the person observing them. We knew how beautiful they were, these islands (2022) is a film and a place, or rather, the spirit(s) of a place, the “Cemetery of the Unknown” in the city of Zarzis. There, at the edge of the sea, a man digs graves for the people who disappear in the attempt to cross the Mediterranean. Based on the recording of places and materials, bodies and gestures that produce landscapes, spaces are interwoven, be they real or remembered, and places re-filmed and re-imagined. In 2025, Images de Tunisie constitutes an attempt at counter-ethnography.  In this film, Younes identified the places that Les Actualités Françaises (France’s agency that disseminated information on the subject of occupied Tunisia) had filmed, namely the villages of Matmata, Douiret, and Tameghza in the south of the country. Younes documents these landscapes and their inhabitants in the present from a radically different perspective. In contrast to the “objective” distance of colonial images, the artist engages in a moving, unstable immersion in the elements, replacing the stereotypes of French propaganda with a visual and tactile empiricism, an intuitive and sensitive curiosity, an openness to the unknown. 

In working on his next project, Younes wanted to meet archaeologists in Brussels. He had become interested in the work of the female potters of Sejnane. There, in the north of Tunisia, women work the land and sculpt clay to create representations of women they call poupées, or dolls. The savoir-faire of these artists, all women, rests on their ability “to channel their inner goddesses”, in Younes’ own words. He wanted to compare the various technologies capable of shaping the bodies: the women’s hands, the summary reconstructions in archaeology, and his own camera.

Already in 2019, in All come from dust, Younes documented terracotta brick production in the city of Tozeur. In filming traditional brick factories in this region located in the Sahara, close to the Algerian border, he was also searching for the knowledge embedded in the places from which his own family originates. Younes was struck by the beauty of the popular architecture and the emotional power of a material that comes from the ground and from the dust. This also proved a way to describe a kind of resilience and physical connection to the landscape. An image symbolised a possibility of reconstructing a world from its own ruins. 

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Younes Ben Slimane (1992, Tunisia) is a Tunisian artist, filmmaker and architect. In 2020, he joined Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in Tourcoing. He has taken part in contemporary art events such as Jaou Tunis and Documenta fifteen mobile Lab, Loop Barcelona. His work has been exhibited at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Institut du monde arabe in Paris, the Mucem in Marseille, the Selma Feriani gallery in Sidi Bou Saïd, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. His films have been selected for international festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival and CPH:DOX, Doclisboa. In 2021, he was awarded the Studio Collector prize.


Yann Chateigné Tytelman, guest curator for the 2024 residency, will be guided laureates over the course of working sessions.