IN THE SHADOW OF OUR FOUNDING FATHER

Belhassen Handous

In the Shadow of our Founding Father is a multimedia installation, part of a project that questions Bourguiba’s capitalist legacy by examining his iconography closely.
In this installation, I use photographic archives, newspapers and audio recordings to present alternative narratives that challenge the official discourse of the regime, which serves as propaganda for its economic model, and I expose elements that enable a counter-history to be constructed.
Like Allan Sekula, I believe that “archives must be read from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced or rendered invisible by the machinery of profit and progress”. Using official images from the period 1972-1987, I present an experimental dive into the final chapter of Bourguiba’s capitalist experiment and its unfulfilled promises of industrialisation, consumerism and prosperity. The images show how this new capitalist model was sold to the outside world while the forgotten working class paid a high price: for forced modernisation, the absence of democracy, and a major social crisis that would bring the regime to an end.

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