On the roof of Dar Meso, the old convent in Tunis, Tunisia
Entering a local market in Bab Souika
Our trip to Tunisia in November 2021 was our first time leaving Europe since we came back from China in July 2020. Even if we spent the entire year traveling to different countries for concerts and residencies, there was something particularly exciting about this trip, and it truly lived up to expectations in introducing us to a completely different cultural landscape.
The basis for our travels was an artist residency project called Dar Meso: a small DIY operation run by Youssef and Florence, two people with a strong dedication to reaching across borders in the arts and building communities in their city. The residency is housed in an old convent just beside the Medina of Tunis in a region of the city called Bab Souika. Even though Dar Meso can host many artists at a time, things have been slow between cancellations and travel restrictions from the pandemic. At one point we shared the residency with Parisian story-teller Lætitia Troussel-Luber and at another time the artists from Maison Fumetti, a Nantes based collective working on comics. The convent’s large garden and scenic rooftop make it a sort of oasis in an otherwise bustling and crowded part of the city.
Dougga in Tunisia
Early in our stay, along with Youssef and some locals working in NGOs, we had a chance to visit Testour for the Pomegranate Festival, and to nearby Dougga.
Dougga is an entire ancient Roman city: the country is filled with ancient sites, many of which are hardly travelled to relative to the world-famous destinations around Italy. The 160 acre site is filled with houses, temples, and an amphitheatre.
The Pomegranate Festival instead was much more modern, and after multiple years of the pandemic the density of crowds at the festival was truly shocking. Besides walking along streets filled with vendors selling every pomegranate related, alongside Testour’s famous cheeses, we managed to have a fantastic meal at a family home that turned itself into a restaurant just for the festival.
Performing on the roof of Dar Meso
Besides exploring the city and its surroundings, we mainly spent our time working in the chapel of the convent, where we set up our instruments to prepare for a concert at the local Café Culturel Liber'Thé and for a class at the Institut Supérieur de Musique de Tunis. After, we dived into composing for several new instruments that we’ve been designing and constructing over the last months, managing to record some music on the roof of the convent.
The highlight of our stay was our daily walks around the city, trying every type of Tunisian food imaginable, and having such a pleasant stay with Florence and Youssef who are just about the most hospitable people we’ve ever met. It was difficult to leave, but we already have hopes to be back for a future project.
