As he completes the final preparations for his exhibition at the B7L9 gallery, in the northern suburbs of Tunis, Rafram Chaddad explores his artistic universe as much as his personal history. The 47-year-old artist, with curly hair that blends with his salt-and-pepper beard, advances with a brisk step, leaving behind an engraving reproducing the shape of Djerba, his native island, decorated with blue and saffron paint, only to come face to face with a mosaic portrait of his grandmother.
The works of this multidisciplinary artist draw directly from the history of his community, that of Tunisian Jews, settled for centuries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean but today reduced to only a few hundred individuals. Rafram Chaddad knows the secrets and anecdotes, the faces and the characters, the places and dates.
Since his return to Tunisia in 2015, he, who grew up in Jerusalem, has been trying to shape and distribute them. His creations are varied and range from posts on social networks, through which he shares snippets of his knowledge and research, to more conceptual works, such as this wooden boat left in an abandoned synagogue in his mother’s village, Metameur (south-east), in 2021.
From this documentary work as intimate as it is scattered, he delivers a retrospective, “The Good Seven Years”, exhibited from August 31 to October 31 and accompanied by an eponymous book published by the Kamel-Lazaar Foundation. The project is at the intersection of contemporary art, research and conservation, as the country’s Jewish population has been massively pushed into exodus.
A life of transgressions
The story of Rafram Chaddad is first and foremost that of the uprooting of the Jews of Tunisia. In 1977, he was only 2 years old when part of his family left the country, torn from their land by the waves of anti-Semitic violence which regularly shook Tunisia during the Israeli-Arab wars, to settle in Jerusalem. “There, Tunisia was everywhere for us. Everything was Tunisian, we spoke Tunisian, we ate couscous twice a week. My father never ate anything other than Tunisian food,” he recalls.
As a child, he grew up in a very closed community but did not find his place there. He wandered from school to school, before escaping when he came of age to study art. From then on, he led a life of transgressions. His refusal to perform military service, obligatory in Israel, landed him in prison three times. During his last detention, he tried to organize a clandestine exhibition but was prevented at the last minute. The military authorities subsequently released him from his obligations.
His artistic explorations then led him to travel through several European countries then to the other side of the Mediterranean, to Tunisia, where he disembarked one evening in the summer of 2004 at the port of La Goulette. Subsequently commissioned to work on the Jewish heritage of North Africa, he went to Libya in 2010, where he was arrested, accused of espionage. He then spent five months in solitary confinement in Abu Salim prison, on the outskirts of Tripoli, a place known as “no return”, in his words, where he suffered torture. He was finally exfiltrated following a diplomatic imbroglio. From this experience, he will draw his first book, published in 2012 in Tel Aviv.
A few years later, Rafram Chaddad opens another chapter of his life: that of the return. In 2015, he settled down in Tunis for good and discovered all the paradoxes that Tunisia has with its Jewish population, between strong attachment to this historic community and nostalgia for an “idealized” era of cohabitation. He categorically refuses this vague feeling: “I don’t think the past was better. This past is fetishized. When we talk about minorities, Jews, Maltese, it is always to evoke the past and not what is happening today in Tunisia. It is a way of escaping the present and avoiding questioning. »
“We arouse suspicion.”
On the contrary, he expresses a very critical position: “We are excluded from the Presidency of the Republic, we cannot be part of the army. All this for one reason: we arouse suspicion. » These rules which exclude non-Muslims from certain national institutions are for Rafram Chaddad only the constitutional extension of a Tunisian imagination made of prejudices and preconceived ideas, where other faiths have no place.
This ambiguity opens the door to latent anti-Semitism which is sometimes expressed more violently. As evidenced by the attack on the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba on May 9: in the middle of the pilgrimage, a member of the National Guard opened fire on the crowd, killing two pilgrims and three members of the Tunisian security forces. That day, Rafram Chaddad lost one of his cousins, Ben Haddad.
The head of state, Kaïs Saïed, then refuted any “anti-Semitic” nature, castigating international reactions while “Palestinians are killed every day and no one talks about it”, without explaining the nature of the link. For Rafram Chaddad, “we have to face things: when we talk about Jews in Tunisia, there is always an elephant in the room, the question of Palestine. »
This denial of anti-Semitism is a constant reaction to his social media posts. But the artist has a sense of humor and debate: he insisted that an official invitation to the opening be sent to the head of state so that he could “come see and discuss”. Faced with the authoritarian drift of Kaïs Saïed, he is categorical: he will continue to be critical whatever the cost. “I’ve been to prison before, it’s not the nicest part of my life, but I’d rather go back than have to stop expressing myself freely. »