Tunisian Revolutions Avenue Bourguiba
Space and Representation
Alberto Valz Gris, AndrĂŠ Fincato
Summary This research aims at exploring the possibilities and contradictions that urban space seems to expose when used as a representational tool. Analyzing the waves of protest that have characterized Tunisia in recent years, our focus will specifically be centered on avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis. This is, in fact, the site that has been been more often associated with such protests by public media. The following essay links a series of episodes, each one relying on a different scale, in order to provide a multifaceted comprehension of the events that have characterized contemporary Tunisia and their relationship with space. Starting from a national overview, it is suggested that Tunis’ very urban protests and rallies are actually rooted in a totally rural or suburban context. The visualization of such data shows how protest events through time happen in progressively more urbanized areas, finally reaching the capital city. Inside the capital itself, this work aims at showing how two spaces, instead of a single one, have had a key role in carrying out such performative events. Because functioning in two different ways, place de la Kasbah and avenue Habib Bourguiba might have had a complementary role in determining the impact of protesters on the institutionalized political order. Despite this complementarity, it is not surprising that it is namely the avenue which absorbs the most significant components of these episodes: as a brief overview through its spatial history suggests, this is the space that has been materially marked by every major political event in Tunisia. The foundation of place du 14 janvier 2011 is, in fact, only the last of these marks. Exploring the possible backgrounds to such dynamics, we suggest that this boulevard has been the most powerful scenery in representing Ben Ali’s one man show, therefore being the most resourceful space to be overwritten by upcoming political subjects. We propose a collection of photographs that seeks to visualize the juxtaposition between the regime’s visual apparatus and the protesters’ meaningful use of such imagery. A series of open questions will conclude this work.
Method This research has been developed without any kind of field research, exclusively relying on second-hand information. This provides, in our opinion, the opportunity to experiment with a more synthetic and critical approach that distance helps to develop. Also, in the following text we avoid the use of notes linking to the myriad of sources we have consulted in favour of readability and accessibility. We offer a synthetic and considered bibliography at the end of the work. Structure Our arguments will be developed through the correlation between a text and other visual components such as maps and photographs, the two implementing each other. Background Tunisia is located in the North African region of Maghreb. Covering an area of 163,610 km2, it has a population of 10,982,754 inhabitants, setting its average density at 63 inhabitants/km2. It is an independent republic since 1956, year in which the French protectorate was abolished. Tunisia has been exposed to wide international media coverage because of the exceptional political events that have characterized it in the last five years approximately, gathered under the name of Tunisian Revolution and, later, democratic transition. A first wave of nation-wide protests, erupted between 2010 and 2011, led to the destitution of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, continuously ruling since 1987 and now sentenced to 35 years of jail for embezzlement and misusing public funds. A second wave of protests, happening between 2013 and 2014, has exploded in reaction to the difficult post-revolutionary political arrangement. A lively opposition is still ongoing between the regularly elected fundamentalist Ennahda party and its secularist opponents.
Alberto Valz Gris, AndrĂŠ Fincato
The progressive urbanization of protest. Images from maps.google.com.
Protest events occurring in Tunisia throughout 2008
Protest events occurring in Tunisia in December 2010
The Tunisian Revolution from its rural roots to Tunis’ outburst Observing avenue H. Bourguiba’s role in the Tunisian Revolution from a national point of view challenges the notion of urban scale, aiming for a more informed and multifaceted comprehension of such events than the one offered by mainstream media. 1/16 The vast majority of the accounts on the Tunisian Revolution sets in fact its starting line on December 17th, 2010, the day when Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire on the main square in Sidi Bouzid for being punished, mistreated and beaten by local police officers. If it is simplistic to claim that a single event can unleash a nation- and macroregion-wide revolution, this is nonetheless an extremely iconic gesture which can actually function as a spark setting a barrel of fuel on fire. However it is still necessary to investigate which could be the primary ingredients and dynamics of such fuel. Bouazizi’s case has, first of all, a few predecessors inside and outside Tunisia. The closest parallel is Abdesslem Trimech’s self-immolation in Monastir in March 2010, himself being a street vendor whose
Protest events occurring in Tunisia in December 2010
stall was confiscated by the police as happened to Bouazizi. Far from being an isolated case, this desperate gesture seems to represent a few conditions which characterize Tunisia’s social discontent. Widespread unemployment, poverty and police repression are the main three components underlined by Bouazizi’s episode. 2/16 A valuable parallel can then be traced with other episodes of revolt, generally defined as the Gafsa strikes. This refers to a series of strikes, rallies and sit-ins occurring through 2008 in the minerary zone of Gafsa, situated in the country’s West. If such region, rich in phosphates, is endemically hit by unemployment and poverty due to mono-industrial development and widespread clientelism, it is these particular events that highlight the brutal reaction of institutional power to pacific protests. Hundreds of detentions, cases of torture and heavy sentences to union organizers and journalists have been reported. Gafsa can therefore be intepreted as a more stable background for the Tunisian 2010-2011 Revolution, and conceived as an iceberg tip stressing the background issues that come to affect Tunisia during recent years and, supposedly, have led to the strong unrest overthrowing Ben Ali’s regime.
Protest events occurring in Tunisia in December 2010
Protest events occurring in Tunisia in January 2011
Operating a connection between the two stories, Gafsa and Bouazizi, one can see how the territorial context where these events happen has already begun to change. The Gafsa region is a mono-industrially exploited land dotted by small towns, while Sidi Bouzid is a regional administrative centre and an important large-scale agricultural market. Analysing such territorial conditions by ordering satel3/16 lite images on a nation-wide protest timeline leads to an insightful hypothesis: from the protests in Redeyef (2008) to the first demonstrations in Tunis (late 2010), we can clearly recognize a progressively urbanizing territorial context. As the colours shade from the orange of sand to the grey of paved strees, passing through the green of cultivated fields, urban structures grow larger and more complex. One possible explanation of such rural or at least suburban roots of a national Revolution is offered by Steve Coll in an article appeared on The New Yorker on April 4th, 2011. Although many other tunisians had self-immolated themselves in recent years, they had done so in the urbanized and coastal areas where social ties are relatively weak. Bouazizi’s context instead, being Tunisia’s southern and central regions, profits from a strong tribal heritage and is characterized by
strong family connections and generally stronger social cohesion. As political scientist Christopher Alexander reports in the same article, a ‘country folks’ solidarity is strongly present there. This hypothesis seems to be intimately connected to the narrative developed by the attached maps. These show how, again on a national scale, protest events 4/16 progressivly concentrate in a few key urban centres. If the rural background serves as the basic social fabric allowing the front to be sufficiently united to be relevant, it seems then that this social subject needs to move to more exposed sites. Tunis appears to be, quite intuitively, the most important among these. It is anyway sufficient to read any report on the Kasbah days to perceive the diversity that characterized those sit-ins. The same people who ignited the revolt in the small cities spread across the country then had to travel to the capital city in order for their claims to be relevant. They appear to do so in order to exploit the representational power of urban space.
Protest events occurring in Tunisia in January 2011
Protest events occurring in Tunisia in January 2011
Protest events occurring in Tunisia throughout 2013
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27/02/2011
25/02/2011
28/01/2011
20/01/2011 21/01/2011 24/01/2011 25/01/2011
14/01/2011
27/12/2010
Timeline of the protest events occuring between Place de la Kasbah and avenue Habib Bourguiba.
Place de la Kasbah and avenue Habib Bourguiba as complementary spaces As the protests fly to Tunis in fact, two urban spaces appear to dominate the center of the stage in this story. Apart from a few revolts in peripheric areas such as Ettadhamen-Mnihla, we see the place de la Kasbah and the avenue Habib Bourguiba exploiting their centrality in Tunis’ urban structure.
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The two immediately emerge in the first protest
01/09/2013
25/07/2013
06/02/2013
24/05/2012
events that mark the capital in December 2010. Even if a detailed account of such events is not the subject of this text, it might be useful to briefly sketch how differently these spaces have been used for expressing dissent, as the comparative sequence of photographs contained in this booklet visualizes. The Kasbah has been home to various episodes, the main of which have been tagged with numbers: Kasbah 1, 2, 3 and 4. These have mainly been gatherings and sit-ins rather than barricade rallies. Protesters would set up camp there, mounting and numbering tents, establishing a camp security committee and de facto organizing a functional urban system. Av. Bourguiba has seen, on the other hand, very specifically targeted events in the forms of rallies and demonstrations. When observing
Timeline of the protest events occuring between Place de la Kasbah and avenue Habib Bourguiba.
these photographs, movements seems to be the most clearly emerging feature of such space. Also, video reports record the constant pronounciation of songs and hymns directed at specific subjects or issues.
15/07/2011
27/02/2011
25/02/2011
28/01/2011
20/01/2011 21/01/2011 24/01/2011 25/01/2011
14/01/2011
27/12/2010
Other than being used differently, such places are characterized by very different features from certain points of view. First of all, the Kasbah and av. Bourguiba 6/16 are two different urban structures. The first one is a square, while the second is a boulevard. This is, of course, a typological simplification, since the Kasbah appears to be a monumental esplanade combined with a smaller scale space closer to a proper square. As such, the Kasbah is a self-contained element, defined by building faรงades around its perimeter, while av. Bourguiba is, in this sense, a much more fluid space. It relies on a linear dimension instead of an enclosed one. Secondly, these two spaces seem to inherit and portray a different sort of power. Kasbahs have ancient and in this case local origins as fortified cities. Boulevards are instead a european artefact later imported in colonised countries. As the next section will develop, this has been the case in Tunis as well, through the establishment of the French protectorate. According to this, the Kasbah square seems to be related to a more distant power than the av. Bourguiba, a form of clear
01/09/2013
25/07/2013
06/02/2013
24/05/2012
15/07/2011
27/02/2011
25/02/2011
28/01/2011
20/01/2011 21/01/2011 24/01/2011 25/01/2011
14/01/2011
27/12/2010
Timeline of the protest events occuring between Place de la Kasbah and avenue Habib Bourguiba.
01/09/2013
25/07/2013
06/02/2013
24/05/2012
Photo by Chedly Ben Ibrahim, demotix.com Photo by Dos Saadi, flickr.com
Photo by Chris Belsten, flickr.com Photo by Chris Belsten, flickr.com
Photo by Amine Ghrabi, flickr.com Photo by Chris Belsten, flickr.com
expression of contemporary (and maybe extraneous) power, ranging from the french domination, through the presidency of Habib Bourguiba, to the domination of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. Thirdly, and accordingly, the elements they contain also differ substantially. The Kasbah hosts the seat of the government, while av. Bourguiba is home to even more politically charged institutions. These are for example the Ministry of the Interior, Ben Ali’s infamous secret police’s organ, and the UGTT’s local section, the main labour union historically present in coordinating protests. Photo by thelovelyplanet.net These arguments might be useful in providing a backPhoto by Chris Belsten, flickr.com ground to the formerly exposed diversities in the use of space, contributing to the effort of extracting general features from particular episodes. The hypothesis here is that both urban structures and represented subjects make a difference in how space is exploited for protest. Accordingly, place de la Kasbah is a more enclosed space than the avenue, less subject to heavy flows and therefore more suitable to be inhabited permanently. On the other hand, av. Bourguiba is a strongly mediatic space, more politically charged and ultimately more suitable for receiving massive flows: it seems to be the ideal space to organize dynamic forms of protest, namely rallies and demonstrations
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Photo by Amine Ghrabi, flickr.com Photo by Chris Belsten, flickr.com
directed to specific targets. Difference should not however be the only point emerging from this narrative. As the attached map shows, in fact, these two spaces appear to have worked together on the protest timeline. No wide temporal gap exists between the use of the Kasbah and the use of av. Bourguiba: the two are constantly intertwined through the protests’ sequence. So, 8/16 the avenue Bourguiba and the place de la Kasbah are both different and complementary: one hosts permanent facilities, the other stages specific productions of meaning. Both of them do have a political tension underlying their formal features. One issue remains however open, concerning the total absence of the Medina, separating place de la Kasbah and avenue Bourguiba on the urban plan, from the Tunisian Revolution protests. Medinas are generally quite different from kasbahs and boulevards, as they are characterized by a strong presence of both commercial activity and residential functions, but rarely of institutional organs or representations of those. This might shade some light on an hypothesis which will be developed later on: that urban space needs to have an intelligible political iconography in order to stage attempts to appropriate it and overwrite it.
Photo by thelovelyplanet.net Photo by Chris Belsten, flickr.com
Photo by Amine Ghrabi, flickr.com Photo by Chris Belsten, flickr.com
Photo by thelovelyplanet.net Photo by Chris Belsten, flickr.com
Architectural transformations and reconfigurations of avenue Habib Bourguiba.
Postcard from the end of the XIX century, lemog3d.blogspot.n
Photo by Mondhier Valegug
Photo from profburp.com
Photo by Phil, flickr.com
Avenue Habib Bourguiba mirroring major political events Appropriation and overwriting are indeed valuable terms for describing avenue H. Bourguiba’s urban history. Being a simple path extending from the ancient medina towards the sea, it was not fully exploited before the establishment of the French protectorate in 1881. However it has been developed since then as 9/16 a strongly mediatic space through various and diverse interventions. This is why it is not surprising at all that a full scale national uprising ended up exactly here. The spatial interventions that have contributed in shaping the appearance, and therefore the meaning and identity of this avenue are different among themselves but oftentimes repeat through history. At first, in post-1881 Tunis, the avenue effectively became an avenue and laid down the pattern for the implementation of the so called Ville Nouvelle: a new, modern urban portion based on a regular grid of perpendicular streets. In a very material sense, the newly established colonial power operated a radical transformation of this space, turning it into a highly designed and regulated space
Photo by Ulrich MĂźnstermann, flickr.com
from the desert it used to be, according at least to the representations given by the same power. In this sense, so-called avenue Jules-Ferry (from the name of the protectorate’s founder) is the emblem of the modernization of Tunis and, by metonymy, of the whole Tunisia. This hypothesis seems to be further validated by the progressive accumulation of certain institutions and buildings along its way. Firstly the Saint Vincent 10/16 de Paul cathedral is inaugurated on the avenue in 1897, followed by the municipal theatre, one of the few examples of art déco theatres in the world, in 1902. The avenue is immediately conceived as an official, formalized urban space. More figurative references such as statues also have undergone quite a few modifications and detours. Jules Ferry’s statue being substituted by Bourguiba’s, and subsequently Bourguiba’s being substituted by Ben Ali’s clocktower at the very end of the avenue towards the sea. Other modifications which the avenue has undergone are not as three-dimensional as the previous ones, but this does not make them less effective or real. As mentioned before, the avenue has changed its name quite a few times: from avenue de la Marine, it has
Photo by Phil, flickr.com
Photo by Ulrich M端nstermann, flickr.com
Photo by Phil, flickr.com
Photo by Ulrich M端nstermann, flickr.com
Photo by josiehen, flickr.com
Photo by Tovarish14, flickr.com
Photo by World Bank Photo Collection, flickr.com
1900 Avenue de la Marine is changed in Avenue Jules Ferry (the founder of the french protectorate)
1956 Independence: Jules Ferry’s statue taken off, the avenue becomes now Habib Bourguiba
been called avenue Jules-Ferry from 1900 onwards. The following major event happening in Tunisia, the country’s independence in 1956, left a mark on the avenue by modifying its name again. It is now that the boulevard is called avenue Habib Bourguiba, inheriting the name of the first president of the independent Republic of Tunisia. Also, the former place d’Afrique, later entitled to the day in which Ben Ali completed his coup d’état, changed its name again very recently. Place du 14 janvier 2011 is named after the most important protest day happened in Tunis during the Tunisian Revolution period.
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Put into context, this very last episode appears to be only the last of many layers. Not an exceptional event but rather an almost routinary update of space that has already been performed several times. Therefore, av. Bourguiba emerges as a clear mirror materially reflecting Tunisia’s major political events. Place du 14 janvier 2011 and, more generally, the layered history of av. Bourguiba bridge the discussion to the last subject which is visually portrayed by the following collection of photographs: does a space need to have an existing and strong political grammar in order to be overwritten by new subjects?
11/10/1988 H. Bourguiba’s statue is replaced by a clock tower, the square is renamed Place du 7 novembre 1987
2011 The square is renamed Place 14 Javier 2014
Does a line of tension exist between the continuous reproduction of this imagery and the possibility of its subversion?
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1900 Avenue de la Marine is changed in Avenue Jules Ferry (the founder of the french protectorate)
1956 Independence: Jules Ferry’s statue taken off, the avenue becomes now Habib Bourguiba
11/10/1988 H. Bourguiba’s statue is replaced by a clock tower, the square is renamed Place du 7 novembre 1987
2011 The square is renamed Place 14 Javier 2014
1900 Avenue de la Marine is changed in Avenue Jules Ferry (the founder of the french protectorate)
1956 Independence: Jules Ferry’s statue taken off, the avenue becomes now Habib Bourguiba
11/10/1988 H. Bourguiba’s statue is replaced by a clock tower, the square is renamed Place du 7 novembre 1987
2011 The square is renamed Place 14 Javier 2014
Photo by Laëtitia Le Mouël, flickr.com
Photo by World Bank Photo Collection, flickr.com
Photo by Tunis Vista, flickr.com
Photo from rfi.fr
Selected bibliography General accounts on the Tunisian Revolution: Bettaïeb V. (2011), Dégage. La révolution tunisienne, 17 décembre 2010 – 14 janvier 2011, Editions du Layeur, Paris. Puchot P. (2012), La Révolution confisquée: Enquête sur la transition démocratique en Tunisie, Sindbad, Arles. PhotoLa from algerlablanche.com Saïdi H. (2011), Tunisie réinvente l’histoire: récits d’une révolution: Un passé troublé et un présent sous pression, L’Harmattan, Paris. Weslati S. (2011), Démocratie ou guerre civile : Chronologie de la révolution tunisienne, Nirvana, Tunis. On the Gafsa Strikes: Chouikha L., Gobe E. (2009), “La Tunisie entre la révolte du bassin minier de Gafsa et l’échéance électorale de 2009”, L’Année du Maghreb, V, pp. 387-420. About the composition of the Kasbah during a sit-in: Coll, S. (2011), “The Casbah Coalition”, The New Yorker. The role of public space during the Revolution: Chomiak, L. (2013), “Spectacles of Power: Locating
Photo from nawaat.org
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Resistance in Ben Ali’s Tunisia”, Portal 9 Journal, 2. Tunis’ urban history: Sebag, P. (1998) Tunis. Histoire d’une ville, éd. L’Harmattan, Paris.
Photo by Tunis Vista, flickr.com
Photo from rfi.fr
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Photo from algerlablanche.com
Photo from nawaat.org
Photo by Tunis Vista, flickr.com
Photo from rfi.fr
Photo from algerlablanche.com
Photo from nawaat.org
Photo from portal9journal.org
Photo from arabianbusiness.com
Photo by Kristen Elsby, flickr.com
This booklet has been completed in December 2014 as a result of the research workshop “Sensing Out Squares”, conducted by Todd Reisz with the students of Sandberg Instituut’s Designing Democracy Master Programme.
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Photo from thejournal.ie
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Photo by Kristen Elsby, flickr.com
Photo from thejournal.ie
Photo by Kristen Elsby, flickr.com
Photo from thejournal.ie
Photo by Klas-Herman Lundgren, flickr.com
Photo by Afp Photo / Fethi Belaid, dailynewsegypt.com
Open questions from: alberto.valzgris@sandberg.nl cc: andre.fincato@sandberg.nl to: chomiak@aimsnorthafrica.org subject: Tunis – Space and Protest Dear Laryssa Chomiak, we are two post-graduate students currently enrolled in Sandberg Instituut’s Designing Democracy master programme in Amsterdam. At the moment we are working together with Todd Reisz on a research workshop about public space and protest. Our group is specifically researching Tunis and the av. Bourguiba during the 2010-11 and 2013-14 waves of protest. We have read your article entitled Spectacles of Power published on portal9 and had a glance at other contributions you have published through the years, although they were not completely accessible to us. Also your intervention at the International Symposium on the Arab Spring in Istanbul in 2012 contains many useful information for our work. We are writing to you because we would like to hear your opinion on the contemporary status of postrevolutionary and post-election Tunis. More specifically, our concern is to have an insight on how a politically charged space such as av. Bourguiba is configured spatially and semiotically after these events. In order to give you some context, we are developing our narrative as follows: after analyzing the protests’ background on a national scale, we found out that Tunis’s outbursts are deeply rooted in a rural/suburban context. Consequently, we interpret the capital city as the key place where to stage mass protests. However, our idea is that av. Bourguiba alone could not work so well as it does when paired with the Kasbah square. If the latter is the space where to organize enduring, static protests, the former is ideal for specifically targeted, dynamic rallies. Nevertheless, we are not surprised by such important role of av. Bourguiba, since we understand it as a space which has, through history, mirrored in a very concrete way the major political events of Tunisia. We conclude our story by visually representing the re-signification of space which has been determined by the transition from Ben Ali’s visual apparatus to the
myriad of signs and messages used by protesters. According to this storyline, we would like you to briefly answer these four questions: 1) Considering av. Bourguiba’s transition from Ben Ali’s spectacle to the main scenery of popular protests, how would you describe its symbolic condition in post-revolutionary Tunis? Have protesters managed to reformulate this space in terms of iconography? 2) After having represented different sources of power, what does av. Bourguiba represent today? Can it be read as the mirror of the currently enduring political stagnation in Tunisia? 3) Understanding the post-revolutionary politics in Tunisia as the unveiling of a multitude of subjects, is the same diversity and openness recognizable in the everyday use of av. Bourguiba today? 4) As a political scientist researching urban space, how regulated do you see this avenue today? Is the thin line representing the tension between strict control and impressive mass outbursts still perceivable? Although our deadline is extremely tight (we have to hand in the printed document tomorrow by 14:00), we do not lose our hopes. If you have the time, we would much appreciate a Skype open-interview based on such four questions. Otherwise short answers by email would be equally appreciated. Your interview will constitute the final piece of our work. Yours sincerely, Alberto Valz Gris André Fincato MFA Designing Democracy Sandberg Instituut Fred. Roeskestraat 98 1076 ED Amsterdam
Designing Democracy — Sandberg Instituut, 2014