Musicians / Visual artist
My name is Yasser Jradi. I am a member of the Tunisian association of amateur filmmakers, as well as a member of the association of cinema clubs. I have been working for these associations for almost 16 years now. According to my formation, I am a visual artist, at the same time I am a founding member of the musical group called “Dima Dima”, we started making music in the year 2004. In general, that is it.
– Reflections on art and revolution
As far as the revolution is concerned, the first thing that came to me was something instinctive, the documentarist in me started to move. I have a small camera, a photo camera, and I brought it out everyday to make films and share them. The first days, on the 12th and 13th of January, I made films that were shown on al-Jazeera and France 24. At that time, artists had not yet been there, so it was a very important thing to show the world what was happening, as the government prohibited the passing of any information. There were no journalists, so we tried… me, for example, I tried to play the role of an informant and a journalist in order to show the world what was happening.
From the 11th of January until now, until yesterday, I have filmed almost every second day what was going on. This means, I document it.
In my opinion, a revolution without a cultural revolution does not help us move on. So a cultural revolution is something very important. A cultural change would mean that we change people’s minds towards culture. Before, there was the mentality of one political party, one kind of taste, one kind of opinion and it was the same thing with culture. The same kind of taste, the same propositions, the same… And after what happened, we want the existence of more points of view, more perspectives, more means of expression. This means that there should exist more cultural varieties. No longer should artists exist only within the hands of the state or of the system. No, there should be a bigger amount of artists who are more diverse in terms of their work and who vary in their propositions, and as well, in their opinions and in their tastes. So in my opinion, the new arts must be arts that are versatile in matters of tastes, in matters of artistic categories, in matters of…I do not want to say ideologies, I do not want to politicize, but it should be versatile in matters of viewpoints. The artists should simply be diverse.
– Kif Kif association
The Kif Kif association has two faces:
First, it ensures unknown artists receive the same opportunities for participation as known artists. This means that it gives them the chance to perform, film their performances and creates dossiers for them. It is the same in France as in Tunisia. It helps them to perform at festivals in France.
This is what has not happened before. As you know, whenever there was a festival in France, the ministry of culture used to choose the groups that they liked and that conformed to their politics and let them tour the whole world, like for example a group called Ouled Jouini They toured the whole world and pretended to make Tunisian music. Although they have nothing to do with Tunisian music, in fact they make music for the youth. The Ouled Jouini toured the whole world.
So it assumes the role of the ministry of culture, but in a more transparent way. To a greater extent, it searches the Tunisian underground for groups that do not have a possibility to perform. That is the first point.
The second point, which is related to cultural consumption, is to enable Tunisian citizens, who cannot afford to go to a concert or a play at the theater due to an entrance fee of 5 or 10 dinars, to watch it for free in the streets or in public places.
So these are the two faces…it gives the same opportunities to artists as well as to audiences. Generally, that is it.
And it is going to work on a number of artistic technologies or artistic forms of expression like music, cinema, theater, performing arts and things that are related to children, like drawing studios for children, things of that type.