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In early 2010, photographer Alejandro Cartagena was awarded the 2009 Critical Mass Book Award for his project, Suburbia Mexicana. Mr. Cartagena’s monograph, an upshot of this award, is now available for purchase from the Daylight store. The book, which was published in partnership between Daylight Books and Photolucida, includes an introduction by the Curator of MoCP, Karen Irvine, as well as text by Mexican photographer, Gerardo Montiel Klint, and an interview conducted by Lisa Uddin. The photographs in the book have a purposeful geographic focus—the city of Monterrey, Mexico. By investigating life and landscape within the limits of Monterrey, the photographs from the book also manage to infer not just regional, but universal, human and environmental concerns. Read Mr. Cartagena’s recent interview with Daylight below.

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Interview by Trent Davis Bailey

Photographs by Alejandro Cartagena (All images from the the project, Suburbia Mexicana.)

Daylight: Let’s begin by discussing Suburbia Mexicana. I’m particularly interested in how you have thematically segmented your four-year project into parts. Those being Fragmented Cities, Lost Rivers, The Other Distance, Urban Holes, and People of Suburbia. Were all of these parts aforethought or did you start with one idea and allow the others to evolve with time?

Alejandro Cartagena: The first images were just explorations of the landscape around Monterrey. I was very interested in looking at land as a cultural and aesthetic space. I wasn’t particularly sure that my work would be fixed on the actual housing developments or the landscape they were inserted in. I think a big change came when I received a grant to pursue the work and I had to concentrate on a specific aspect of the expanding Mexican suburbs. I did a bunch of research on what was happening around these housing developments and when I came across a map with locations of more than 100 of them, I decided to focus on that—a meticulous documentation of these new "Fragmented Cities." After one year of photographing I became interested in the historical background of representations of such constructions. It seemed appropriate to think this way as it would push me towards rethinking how I could propose a dialectic view of past patterns of suburbanization and the contemporary consequences spawned from them. That is mostly how the rest of the works came about—a search for causes and effects of suburbia.

D: As you just noted, your photographs depict urbanization and development within Monterrey, Mexico, which reflects how rapid growth has impacted the region’s natural resources. While your focus is geographically narrow, there is a sense of a universal statement with these photographs. Is that your intention?

AC: Definitely. I was actually tempted to "expand" the work to all Mexico, still one country, but it was unnecessary. I am convinced that we (photographers) can now produce work locally and still think of it as a global issue. I also took into the work connotations of the history of landscape photography, aesthetically and conceptually, and created with this an explicit dialogue with broader issues about the way we have used land in western culture.

D: What do you feel is the role of a photographer examining the deficiencies of urban policy and expansion versus, say, a journalist writing about it?

AC: The journalist is still very much tied to facts. I can still start from facts but explore other relationships that are more intuitive or subjective. I would like my work to be perceived as a comment that opens up relationships that are speculative and factual at the same time. The journalist might not want open-ended reporting.

D: In using photography to comment upon municipal concerns, what do you hope others will take away by looking at your work?

AC: It is very hard to say I want a specific response from my viewers. I can tell you my work has many preoccupations, as you mention, that deal with the abuse of land, the construction of culture through space, corruption and its manifestations in the landscape, social injustice and division through private property, et cetera. I still feel art should be a balance of subjectivity and a political stance from the artist.

D: Speaking of politics, city planning is a topic that can often be fraught with pessimism, yet your photographs don’t feel overtly disapproving. While many of the images show telltale signs of faulty development, you still find beauty — and occasionally a strange, unnerving sense of order — within the urban environments in which you photograph. In many cases, it’s difficult to tell whether aesthetics or concept is more influential, or if they somehow influence each other. What do you feel is the balance between the two with your work?

AC: I want my images to portray an aesthetic sensibility that enables the work to be seen as a dynamic dialectical conflict. I can’t only judge this phenomenon as negative or positive—it actually sits very much on both sides depending on whom you talk to. My new work is actually a very personal approach to the "Mexican dream" of home-ownership, which is behind the Suburbia Mexicana work. There are always new ways on how to approach urban planning. I am still very much excited about how I can still grow my work to more complex readings of the city, the suburbs and their inhabitants. There is still much to be said about these issues.

D: In relation to art history, many of your cityscapes recall the sprawling and mountainous paintings by the Hudson River School, as well as the prominent skies of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. This is fitting considering both groups of painters were often depicting settlements, much like you do with your photographs in Suburbia Mexicana. What artists, writers, and thinkers have influenced and informed your work the most?

AC: A dialogue with the past is something that interests me very much, and so I am constantly trying to include things in my work that can broaden both the aesthetics of the image and the understanding of it. Lately I have been reading texts related to Visual studies—Brian Holmes, Ángel Rama, [and] Jose Luis Brea. I also look into texts by David Harvey and other social theorists.

I am also influenced by photo books. The newest ones on my desk are Robert Adams’ Denver, Trevor Paglen’s Invisible, John Gossage’s The Pond, Larry Towell’s The World from My Front Porch, Joachim Brohm’s Ohio, and a few others.

D: …and what’s next for Alejandro Cartagena?

AC: Continue the several projects I have been working on since 2009 and hopefully finish one of them by summer. Finish my Masters degree. Start a new project I’ve wanted to start and have fun with all of it.

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For more information about Alejandro and his work, visit: http://alejandrocartegena.com

The Cape Farewell project, created in 2001 by artist David Buckland, is a multidisciplinary project that brings together leading artists, writers, scientists, educators, and media in an ongoing attempt to instigate a cultural response to climate change. At the core of its mission is to create stories and art with a narrative of how climate change is impacting the wilderness and mankind, based on the notion that artists can engage the public through creative insight and vision: "The arts are a core part of the Cape Farewell project: one salient image, a novel or song can speak louder than volumes of scientific data and engage the public's imagination in an immediate way."

Their current exhibition, U-n-f-o-l-d, is a delightful mixture of fiction and non-fiction; the photography and other artwork in the installation treads the waters between documentary and fine art, embracing both the subjective, personal response and the traditional role of documentary to bring about social change.

This week marks Katy Grannan's East Coast debut of her first foray into the moving image: The Believers, a three-channel video installation that stars three performers who Grannan has been working with over time. A twin show around the corner will feature a series of color photographs, Boulevard, made with a medium-format digital camera often in the harsh hot light of the California sun. The subjects are characters she meets on the street, those fated to the mostly untrafficked sidewalk in a land full of dreams and dreamers otherwise safely tucked away in their cars. The shows open later this week at 6 p.m. on April 1st , and are on view through the 30th at Salon 94 Freeman's and Salon 94 Bowery, both on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at One Freeman's Alley and 243 Bowery, respectively. The galleries are open Tuesday afternoons, and Wednesdays through Saturdays, regular gallery hours. http://www.salon94.com/exhibitions/81/index.htm#current Stay tuned, as there is much more to report once this writer has seen the shows in a few weeks...

Joerg Colberg (Conscientious) and I kicked off the next set of Ping Pong conversations after meeting up in New York during Arts Week.

Joerg: When I came to New York for a couple days about a week ago, I noticed that everybody assumed I had come for the art fairs. The fact that that was not the case resulted in many surprised faces. Maybe the art fairs are a good topic to talk about? Did you go? And if you did, why exactly did you go? What for?

Michael: No doubt, New York’s Armory Show and the surrounding ‘Art Week’ is a big draw for collectors and curators from all over the world. In previous years, I have found the fairs to be overwhelming in the sheer amount of art on display not to mention the continual crowds on the floor. It is a pretty amazing way to encounter actual objects from artists and galleries around the globe but the funnest part has to be the accompanying festivities of dinners and parties. This year I was so busy preparing, hosting and recovering from our book launch party on March 4th that I barely had the opportunity to browse the Armory show. What I did see was a bit underwhelming. A couple people I talked to discussed the thawing market in Europe and had high hopes for this years fair. This week, of course, AIPAD will be coming to the Park Avenue Armory, any plans to be in town for that?

Joerg: First of all, your book launch party was great, I’m glad I was able to attend it. The books look great!

To answer your question, no, I won’t be able to come since I’ll be in Amsterdam, at a meet-up that is part of FOAM’s What’s Next? But it’s unlikely I would have gone to AIPAD. It’s not that I don’t like seeing photography, and I also don’t mind seeing gallery shows - I go regularly. But art fairs or events like AIPAD are way too much about selling photography - or “the market” as people like to call it - and that’s just not interesting for me. I’m interested in photography and what it can say, but I’m not interested in the market.

Maybe I’m going to be a bit provocative here. The talk about “the market” in photography reminds me a bit of the talk of the stock market and the economy as a whole. People love talking about the stock market, and it seems that as long as the stock market is fine, all is well. But when you talk to people who are not involved in the financial sector, the situation is quite different. Unemployment is a big problem right now, but you wouldn’t really know that from the front pages, because as long as “the market” is fine, everything is fine. An example, fresh from today. At some meeting in Queens, New York Fed President William Dudley tried to tell people that inflation wasn’t such a big deal, because even though food might have got more expensive the new iPad 2, which can do so much more, costs the same as the old one. I love the reaction of one of the audience members quoted in the article: “"I can't eat an iPad.” So there’s this fundamental disconnect going on there, between someone who obviously doesn’t have to worry about buying groceries and who can easily afford to be amazed about an iPad, and people who do have to worry about their groceries and who probably can’t afford an iPad.

I can’t help but think about all the photographers I’ve talked to recently, especially commercial/editorial ones, who have told me about the immense business problems. A lot of people really don’t know whether their businesses will survive. Photographers in what we call the “fine art” sector of course have known these kinds of problems for a while, but obviously the recession hasn’t helped. I don’t want to sound like a cheap populist here, but measuring how well photographers are doing by how well people are selling what actually really is just the tip of the tip of that giant iceberg that is the photo scene - that just seems very wrong to me. And an iceberg seems like a good metaphor for the photography scene: Most of it is under water, invisible. I like what’s produced by that shiny tip, but I also want to know about the mass under water.

So I’m much more interested in how photographers as a whole are making money than to find out whether the art fairs or AIPAD are a success. A recent example of something that could help photographers, in this case photojournalists, is a site called emphas.is, a platform to raise money for photography projects (much like Kickstarter) and to connect audiences with photographers. That’s very important for me. I have been writing about photography on my website for a long time, and I’ve always been interested in how to connect photographers with wider audiences, audiences beyond the caviar crowd. Because I still think that many photographers have stories to tell that really can make this planet a very slightly better place (we talked about this in an earlier conversation). Just think of the two books that Daylight just published - of course, those are stories that ideally will reach a larger group of people. It will help you guys to make back your money (and thus lay the foundation for more books), but it will also expose many people to things they might not see otherwise, not in what’s left of their newspapers and certainly not on TV.

But I’ve also become increasingly concerned that there is a real disconnect between parts of contemporary photography and the public. As I said I’m not interested in making this populist or drag out the old and boring “elitism” debate. And maybe I’m completely off here. But still... What’s your take on this?

Michael: Well, I don’t really disagree with you on anything here. I am glad to see emerging models for funding projects as this has always been a struggle for independent creatives and ‘crowd-sourcing’ seems natural in this hyper-connected digital era. One of the founders of Emphas.is is Tina Ahrens who, appropriately enough, used to work in Geo’s New York office before it was shuttered last year. In light of this, Daylight’s main goal is to provide a platform for quality work and we have attempted to do this with our magazine, multimedia, blog, iPad app and, most recently, books. I am glad to hear you like them! We have had a positive response so far with write-ups in the New Yorker, New York Times and the UK’s Telegraph running the multimedia piece for Bruce Haley’s Sunder.

As far as the fairs go, the art market has proven itself to be nearly as mutable as stocks with old masters behaving as more or less reliable commodities and younger artists hyped up (in the manner of green tech) as representing the (under funded) future. Of course, the stock market’s boom and bust, bull and bear, mentality applied to the arts leads inevitably to overinflated appraisals of value and and the danger of burst bubbles. Belts are tighter all around right now and there is absolutely a disconnect between most of society and the small contingent of art-world elite that attend major art fairs let alone take the ‘Grand Tour’. 

Since the recession there have been some fantastic pop-up spaces filling in the gaps where other institutions once existed. For example, Daylight’s book launch was held at 25CPWwhich was once a Gristedes supermarket. This massive space had trouble finding commercial renters and, for the last 18 months, has hosted a number of interesting exhibitions, launches and fundraisers.  Just last month I stopped by 25CPW for the launch of the second edition of Swipe Magazine featuring the artwork of Met Museum guards. Other notable efforts include the XInitiative which appeared in the former DIA space on 22nd street, Boffo, and No Longer Empty. Some shows spring up in alleys and warehouses and are torn down just as quickly - check out some of the activities in Bushwick.  On a final note there have been successful attempts to make art collecting more accessible notably Jen Bekman’s 20x200.

While the landscape of contemporary photography is certainly shifting the creative responses (ie. emphas.is and pop-up spaces) have been inspiring.  Living outside of the city are you less concerned with physical venues for exhibition? What is the arts community like in your neck of the woods?

Joerg: I don’t think the solution to art’s problems is to convert more people into collectors, aka consumers. I really don’t. At least for me that’s not what art is about. Art is about so much more, and having an “original print” in your house is only a small part of that. Art is about experiencing something.

What you really want is more people to become permanently interested in art, resulting in an overall larger participation in what the art world has to offer. I don’t even understand why the collecting aspect is supposed to be so important. I mean by placing an emphasis on affordable art, we’re basically throwing art into the same bin as plastic Godzillas, say, or 1970’s Kenner Star Wars figurines or Barbies. Don’t get me wrong, my book shelf has tons of Godzillas in front of my photobooks. But there is a large difference for me between the two. The Godzillas are for the giggles. The books, at least the ones I look at regularly, are for something much more profound.

I like the idea of “independent” art spaces, whatever they might be. Of course New York City is almost an impossible place to pull something like that off because the city is so expensive now. Doing “guerrilla” shows or using spaces that are available just for a short period of time clearly seems like something that has tremendous potential. Since I don’t live in New York, I’ve never been to any, unfortunately.

My neck of the woods is vastly different from the city, of course. For the kind of art I’m interested in, this area is pretty much hopeless. Or maybe I should say there is almost nothing going on (apart from the occasional OK show at UMass Amherst). This area would be ideal for shows of all kinds, since there is so much space available. There are so many communities where you could buy or rent space for almost nothing. You could stage fantastic shows here, but of course that would require people from New York or Boston, say, willing to drive out here. Not going to happen. I even have trouble convincing people to come up and visit. People who grew up in Boston think any place that requires an hour driving is basically a foreign country (you can tell them we got Dunkin Donuts here, but they don’t believe that); and people in Manhattan... I don’t know what it is. The art world is weird that way. There is a bit of an insular thing going on, where people seem to prefer to stay in their own bubble. Don’t get me wrong, New York is a pretty cool bubble. But it’s still a bubble.

The arts community here is centered more on an older generation. A lot of people moved here in the 1960s when things here were really cheap. There are some art programs at the local colleges, but graduates pretty much leave as soon as they can. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there is a lot of pottery here. Stuff like that. I mean pottery might be nice and all, but it’s just not what I’m interested in.

Thinking about it, what I called the art bubble that is New York, which is really a physical thing, seems to be connected to the bubble that is the art world in general. I don’t know whether that makes any sense, though. What do you think?

Michael: Yes, I see a pretty direct connection although the surface of the bubbles’ are of various degrees of thickness. The insular art world operates on hype and scarcity inflating the price-point of various artists and increasing the perceived value of their output. For the most part it is all a lot of hot air and, as the bubble expands, it gets thinner and thinner until it pops. The insularity of the New York art scene, on the other hand, is dependant on a perceived exclusivity defined loosely by geography and social circles. In this case the bubble is a protective shield surrounding a select group and keeping others out...

Fovea Exhibitions

The distance between the real-world effects of art making/exhibition and the mechanization's of the art market is ironic at best. In general, we seem to agree on the value of the distribution of art and the potential for non-urban centers to create alternative art-world meccas. DIA Beacon, for example, is an amazing space and a worthy (not to mention beautiful) day trip from Manhattan. Speaking of Beacon it now boasts two interesting art venues in addition to a not-to-be-missed RetroArcadeMuseum. Fovea Exhibitions has had a strong exhibition history (including a show I curated of ChristopherChurchill’s work in 2009) and the recently opened EstuaryGallery has its inaugural exhibition on display until May 1st. I am sorry to hear that there is not a lot going on up where you are. Do you have a basement or garage we could transform into a gallery? Or at least put a pool table in?

Estuary Gallery

As far as over-arching goals for art I am less concerned with “larger participation” in the art world than, perhaps, with engendering a higher degree of critical/creative engagement with the world at large. Put another way, I believe arts most valuable function is re-orienting us towards a new relationship with ourselves and society. The most successful art can and does catalyze this re-positioning often operating entirely outside of traditional institutions. However, I do enjoy when museums make an effort to draw the public in with late-night openings, free admission and/or parties. PS1, MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum all have been pursuing these programs for a few years now. More novel still, the Rubin Museum, what I consider a soft institution, recently held a Dream-Over where members of the public were invited to spend a night amongst the art with live sitar music!

Joerg: Well, for people to experience what art has to offer - which can be, as you say, to re-orient us - people have to engage with it. So we’re talking about the same thing here. To tell you the truth, I’m quite skeptical about museums - especially about museums inside the New York bubble - because you don’t have a real museum culture here, where people might go to a museum on a lazy Sunday. Some people might do that, but most people won’t. Plus, by construction, museum shows are organized by museum curators, and what museum curators see as important often is at odds with what most people would see as important. Not that I have anything against museum curators, of course.

It seems to me that something fundamental has to change. Parties or free admission at museums is great, but if that’s the kind of incentive for people to go to a museum I don’t think that cuts it. I mean all of the events you talked about might be great for a New York crowd, but again, I’m interested in how to get more people interested in what art has to offer. A lot of people in New York read my blog, but so do a lot of people not living there, and I often notice that people think that things are only happening in New York and not elsewhere. That might actually not even be the case, but there certainly is some truth to this.

So what interests me is how we could use the web to break out of these same-old, long-tried ways of trying to lure people into the bubble? It seems to me the most obvious way - which is tied in with what the internet does - is to have more people participate. I’m probably repeating myself here, but the internet has lately become mostly a marketing tool. That’s a huge missed opportunity. Even so-called social networking seems to be 95% about marketing (I’m talking about photography here, maybe if I looked at pottery it would be different).

There are some attempts, however, to change things around; and I believe that photographers should really look at the web not as a way to distribute their PR only, but really as a big, big tool to share with people what they do, to get people interested in that. Thing is many photographers are passionate about something or have a story to tell. And people love stories. I’m thinking, for example, of my friend Mark Tucker’s new website - MyDayWith.com - where he goes out to take photos of people he runs into (plus movies), and he publishes those stories online. More well-known is Phil Toledano’s dayswithmyfather.com. Of course, the sites are photography based, but they’re about more than that.

So when I think of combining such efforts with, let’s say, renting a barn out here in Western Mass (where there are tons of cheap places), to stage a show, that has me really excited. It would be straightforward to combine using such an unusual venue with whatever the web has to offer btw (just think of how Winkleman Gallery used the web for their show #hashtag). Because it would leave the bubble so much art is happening in. It would literally take things out of the kinds of contexts we’re seeing things in right now. I feel that we need to take things more out of their usual contexts, to see whether there is something else. That re-orienting that you talked about - sometimes that really needs us to physically move somewhere where we haven’t been before. It’s almost like what the narrator in Thomas Bernhard’s novella Walkingtalks about when he notes that the act of walking is intimately tied to thinking, because when you physically move that makes your mind move.

So maybe we really need to have Daylight stage a show in, say, Western Mass? Would be cheap to do!

Michael: I love taking long walks there is no doubt it helps stimulate and refresh my mind. Years ago I used to try seated meditations and breathing exercises but I have since lost the discipline. Walking, on the other hand, is a great way to practice mindfulness, focus on my breath, and let thoughts flow over and through. Ill often focus on a project and come back with a solid direction to move forward. If we look at evolution only very recently have we become a sedentary culture and normally moved around all day, foraging, hunting etc so it makes sense that I find solace in the rhythmic motion of walking. For more on that check out the Barefoot (Harvard) Professor.

Psychologically speaking there is also something purifying about moving through space, passing things and continuously encountering new information. In the city, often enough this information is a bit of rubbish or an advertisement of some sort. Last  year I was taking a run and enjoying a crystal clear afternoon when I noticed a huge Geico advertisement being written in the sky! Of course that is not nearly as novel as Coca-Cola’s failed bid to use the moonasabillboard.

Advertisers have made a lot of headway in creating cross-platform strategies of engagement with their demographics. I used to love playing little games on the back of cereal boxes but now you are just as likely to receive a login code with free credits to play snack themed games. Talk about rotting your brain! Its surprising to me how few artists have really tried to work with something as participatory and popular as video games... Now there is a piece of art I could live with! 

Back to the idea of barn conversion the team at the Wassaic Projectthat have turned an old farm into a residency and gallery space. It is right near the Metro North station and seriously worth a visit especially during their much lauded Summer Festival. That said, I am all for doing a show with you somewhere off the beaten path. Perhaps we can coordinate it—trans-platform style—with a book launch party including live video feeds, instant twitter updates and implantable cameras to keep the world informed? We can still keep it homey with some bluegrass and bourbon...

Joerg: Well, you want to tie things in with some sort of participatory efforts so that even if you’re not there you are still part of at least something. I don’t think I think Twitter updates are so useful, though, because it is, after all, a one-way street. I find “live blogging” or “live tweeting” pretty obnoxious. There’s got to be more than doing an event in the countryside (outside of New York) just so it’s different. The countryside aspect can’t be just a gimmick.

I find it amazing that so many artists come to New York even though it’s literally the worst place for them to do art. It’s great if you want to go to all the openings, but doesn’t it more sense to spend all that time producing art instead? Producing art is really tough, and doing it in a city that’s so insanely expensive seems... crazy almost. So I think doing something that’s not an event or show in New York ideally would tie in with more that’s happening. But maybe even just starting off with a big event somewhere, renting a barn or whatever and staging a great show for a week or two - that would be quite something. And ideally, it’d be interactive in ways that the art scene currently is not, so that you could participate even if you’re not there, in whatever way. I’ve been thinking about that for a while now, one of those crazy ideas in my head.

Michael: New York is a pretty nutty place to come and do anything let alone create art. Its a bit of a snowball effect as there are so many artists here, and such a lively cultural scene, that people want to come and be a part of it. I grew up not two hours away and was pulled in by the city’s gravity like so many others.... There is something to be said for the energy and excitement of the events and openings but there is also, as Nayland Blake once said, the “danger of becoming a constant spectator.” Its no picnic but it aint boring neither!

I am interested in exploring this idea of remote participation but I am also interested in helping to create local art scenes that are vibrant and self-sufficient. Its one thing to have a cabin in the middle of nowhere with, say, projected content submitted by artists/browsers online and another if there is the possibility a real time dialogue created between two groups of people... In any case I am excited to explore this idea more with you - as long as we can keep the beer cold and the blues hot!

INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually.

The project is an affirmation of one of the fundamental goals of documentary photography, which is to make the invisible visible; to document the stories and people who otherwise are not being heard. The project also reminds us that we, photographers and otherwise, need to remain engaged with our communities.

The INSIDE OUT project is a creation of the street artist JR, who is the recipient of the 2011 TED Prize (watch JR's TED talk here). Among some of his other past projects are Portrait of a generation  (2006), large format portraits of the suburban "thugs" that were posted in the bourgeois districts of Paris; Face 2 Face (2007) involved posting huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities and on both sides of the Separation wall; and his project Women (2008) which uses his massive portraits to underline the dignity of women all over the world who are often the targets of conflicts.

To become involved go to http://www.insideoutproject.net/

JR on "Artocracy in Tunisia: Art, People and Freedom":

Six Tunisian photographers travelled the country to take pictures of 100 "normal" Tunisians representing the Tunisian diversity: men and women, young and old, from North, South, East, and West, rich or poor, civil servants, business people, workers, farmers, unemployed, and much more….For a country which has only exposed in the streets the portraits of the ruler, this makes quite a difference.

For the first large street exhibition in a nascent Arab democracy, the posting promised to be surprising and the confrontation with art not always simple. Our first two days were quite hot (insulted in La Goulette the first day, posters taken down in Tunis the second day). So we decided to go to Sidi Bouzid (where it all started), an isolated region, to work with those who did the revolution before coming back to the popular districts of the capital.

There is nothing better to understand the weight of traditions and the willingness to change than to post big portraits in the symbolic places of the popular districts and try to explain the concept to people nearby…

And then, we received a warm welcome in Sfax, Sidi Bouzid, Le Kram where men and women (OK, mostly men) have asked questions, challenged the project, raised objections, posted with us, explained the project to their neighbors…

We come back with hope that Tunisia will become a country open to art as Spain after Franco or Berlin after the wall was taken down.

Artocracy in Tunisia, is an project initiated by Slim Zeghal and Marco Berrebi and created with the group of Tunisia photographers including Sophia Baraket, Rania Dourai, Wissal Dargueche, AzizTnani, Hichem Driss and Héla Ammar.

READ A FEATURE IN AL JAZEERA ABOUT THE ARTOCRACY IN TUNISIA PROJECT

More images from INSIDE OUT in Tunisia: