Place de 14. Janvier 2011; What it feels to be subjected or become a Subject to . . . Life under the Dictatorial Governance of the Ben Ali Regime, Tunis 2010
The young grown up men suffering from a devastatingly widespread lack of economic opportunities. For instance had the Ben Ali Regime made up contracts with it’s European Union neighbor Italy, to rent it’s fishing grounds on and off the tunisian coast, to the Industry, so as to forbid it’s own population to live off the livestock of the sea. Fishermen where no longer allowed by draconic penitentiary measures, to go hunting in their little small entrepreneurial fishing boats. The young men who, by condition of live thread, developed largely nocturnal strategies, to go fishing in areas they weren’t allowed and regularly clashed or enveloped in a catch as catch can game with the local ordinance and Police, for gathering livestock from the sea, witch in turn they would manage to sell on the black market, say for instance two kilos of their lesser size and quality fish for one or two larger size fish, that although they were available, in no ways would or could it substitute or satisfy local demand, seemingly by being overpriced, since what was eventually „lent“ back to Tunesian people, was their own game and livestock to export deal conditions. Which was obviously more than absurd of a situation, at any given rate of understanding the way market functions, but even then I’ve registered, always this moment of hesitation so adamantly purveying to our own Mid-European cultural predispositions and why it was so hard to imagine at the time these cunning underpinnings to the abhorrent situation, to understand fully the endemic suffering the tunisian people were subjected to and by degrees most likely still are.
Gafsa Tunisia, Novembre 2007
