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Techno-Ecologies and Bodies of Memory: the Environment as Battleground

Group exhibition, discursive program, live performance, and workshops

Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien 19 July – 5 October 2025; eSseda.lab, Goethe-Institut Tunis, Tunis, CineMadart, Carthage 22 - 27 October 2025

Techno-Ecologies and Bodies of Memory: The Environment as Battleground is a multilayered exhibition that develops through satellite spaces and artistic interventions, extending across geographies and media.

The project looks at the environment as a contended, contested, and torn arena, in which political, social, and economic forces and tensions converge and conflict. Amidst the global environmental crisis, wars, and ongoing genocides, the exhibition navigates the complexities of the bonds between all connected forms of matter on our planet. In particular, it explores more-than-humans as sites of memory. Within this framework, it examines critically the part played by digital technologies, and the ambivalent modes of shaping the set of relationships between organisms and their ecosystems, as well as the governance and preservation of data. Looking at the environment as a theatre of conflicts and, simultaneously, as a fighting subject, in what ways does it embody, transform, expose or, conversely, hide or erase wounds and scars?

The artworks included in the exhibition critically reflect upon the modes by which colonialisms and imperialisms have performed domination and oppression on and through the environment over time.

These questions are addressed through the exhibition, as well as a series of workshops and talks, a booklet, and a satellite programme.

Artists:

Al-Block (Areej Ashhab & Sireen Alawi), Mahmoud Alhaj, Mahmoud Alshaer, Qusay Awad & Dhia Douss, Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer, Silvia Camporesi, Ghassen Chraifa, Dennis Dizon, Samia Henni, Gabriella Hirst, Aigerim Kapar, Artcom Platform, Souad Mani, Natural Contract Lab, Marina Resende Santos, Micol Roubini, Himali Singh Soin, Nasan Tur, Wujud, Haythem Zakaria.

Graphic design: Natasha Agapova

Curator: Dr. Marianna Liosi

Visit here for the Arabic and German versions.

a project of Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien curated by Marianna Liosi in partnership with eSseda.lab Funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes

eSseda.lab ال ّسدة est un espace dédié à la création, à l'expérimentation et aux échanges artistiques et académiques mêlant les arts, les sciences humaines et naturelles ainsi que les techniques.

Ce projet est le fruit d'un partenariat entre Association DELTA et l'Institut Supérieur Agronomique de Chott-Meriem à Sousse. Son objectif est de transformer un ancien grenier situé dans le site de l’institut en un lieu dont les activités sont axées sur les enjeux écologiques, les environnements numériques et biologiques. Elles abordent notamment, les questions de frontières, de paysages et de mémoires.

eSseda.lab est conçu et dirigé par Souad Mani, artiste plasticienne et enseignante. Il prend forme grâce à la collaboration scientifique et artistique entre Souad Mani, Marianna Liosi commissaire d'exposition et Wael Garnaoui, psychanalyste, tous.tes enseignant.es universitaires en Tunisie et en Europe. Le projet est devenu possible grâce au financement de Mophradat à travers son programme Self-Organization” 2023. La programmation des événements de cet espace se manifeste à travers des projections de films, des débats, des séminaires, des rencontres entre chercheurs et artistes, des résidences d’artistes, des expositions et des ateliers participatifs.

eSseda.lab est réfléchi comme un espace et une dynamique de travail transdisciplinaire, afin de favoriser la participation de son milieu composé de chercheur.se.s, d'expert.e.s, d’artistes, d'étudiant.e.s et d’activistes avec un focus sur la scène locale et une ouverture sur l’international.

Acts of Reciprocity

research residency in Sousse, Tunisia

Acts of reciprocity is a research residency carried out by Marianna Liosi, at the invitation of the Delta Association (Arts-Sciences-Territoires), Sousse (Tunisia).

The residency has been taking place from February 13 to March 7, 2024 between Sousse and Chott-Meriem. In coordination with Delta Association, Marianna Liosi is developing fieldwork around the following questions: What legacy and what marks of past violence are visible on the natural, agricultural, urban and marine landscape of the Chott-Meriam region and its surroundings in Tunisia? What awareness-raising actions have been undertaken by local artists, communities, and researchers, and what forms of autonomy and endurance have been activated? Within this framework, what is the role of the artist-researcher's work in Tunisia, in an insecure local and global political context?

Among the several individual and group activities, as part of the research residency, Marianna will curate three public events.

Marianna’s research residency is a preparatory phase for the co-creation of the artistic and scientific program of the eSseda.lab project space, which will officially open its doors to the public in April 2024 at the ISA in Chott-Meriem.

Acts of Reciprocity is made possible thanks to Culture Moves Europe. Funded by The European Union and Goethe-Institut.

#sousse #chottmeriem #souadmani #walidbenghezala #research #fieldwork #artresidency

Thursday 22 February 2024, 9am-4 pm

Workshop: Group walk and Rendez-vous sur l’herbe, led by Marianna Liosi and artist Souad Mani at the Landscape Architecture Department, Higher Institute of Agronomic Sciences of Chott Mariem (ISA-CM)

Saturday 24 February 2024, 4 pm

Video screening of The Tide Will Carry Us, 2023, by Walid Ben Ghezala and discussion, at the presence of the artist (online), at De l’Image à l’Atelier, Sousse.

Walid Ben Ghezala, The Tide Will Carry Us , 2023, 19:25

Walid Ben Ghezala, The Tide Will Carry Us, 2023, 19:25 The Tide Will Carry Us follows, at nightfall, the journey of the men of a neighborhood popular area of the city of Tunis, from the alcohol depot to the seaside area. In this documentary essay, the videographer Walid Ben Ghezala recomposes in a single space-time countless hours of cassette recordings from his nocturnal wanderings. One night, on the beach of this working-class suburbs of Tunis, tongues are loosened and minds are freed, and the portrait of the of a generation, its taboos and its hopes.

Wednesday 28 February 2024, 3.30 pm

Carte Blanche Marianna Liosi | Conversation with Souad Mani (Sousse) at De l’Image à l’Atelier, Sousse.

For her second appointment at De l'Image à l'Atelier, Marianna Liosi proposes a dialogue between the artist and researcher Souad Mani that will focus on the artist's transdisciplinary and transmedia practice, between Land Art and the digital environment. The artist will talk about her most recent and significant projects and experiences, as well as her collective and relational work as a teacher and artist. Among her independent artistic initiatives, Mani will focus on De l'image à l'Atelier and the upcoming project, eSseda.lab, which have been established from the specificities of the local context of Sousse and Tunisia.

Xposures

A two-day exhibition, with performances and talks.

With: Farokh Falsafi, Asuman Kirlangic, Philipp Khan, Jeremy Knowles, Alexey Kokhanov, Rebecca Pokua Korang, Maharu Maeno, Ksenia Lapina, Carlos Ricoy, and Sepehr Talebi.

Curated by Marianna Liosi

8th and 9th July 2023, Schwartzsche Villa Berlin

Xposures is a two-day open-air exhibition and program of performances taking place in and around the garden of the Kulturhaus Schwartzsche Villa in Steglitz. The project highlights the power of collective actions in sensitising communities and propelling new ideals, as well as in protecting, questioning, and reappropriating the public domain (both urban and natural). Simultaneously, Xposures reflects upon the politics of exhibiting, and pro- cesses of re-negotiating narratives and legacies that such practices activate.

Ten emerging artists based in Berlin – from the Global South, Europe, Asia – are invited to deve- lop a rich program of site-specific interventions. The artists have been inspired by, or respond to through their individual works, the history of Schwartzsche Villa as a place of art and culture in Steglitz, the cultural heritage of the Wander- vögel archive, and the highly debated issue of the preservation of sites of former Nazi forced labour camps in Berlin, as well as the stories of inma- tes who were imprisoned. Within this framework, strategies of exhibiting, the related emotional implications, and the disclosure of underdiscussed problematic pasts are highlighted and questioned. Exhibiting creates scenarios. As performance stu- dies scholar Diana Taylor (2003) claims, scenari- os, like narratives, ‘with their own classifica- tions, categories, themes, forms and characters (...) grab the body and insert it into a frame’ (Taylor, 2003, 55) and thus place ‘the spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics’ (Ibid., 33). Simultaneously, exhibiting itself implies the intention to unveil something, in the sense of revealing experiences, perspecti- ves, or stories. It also embeds an act of (self-) exposure – a process in which vulnerabilities and emotions are disclosed, shared and offered to ot- hers. In that sense, the ways in which objects – such as artworks, testimonies, and archives – are displayed in exhibitions, and even how bodies per- form in collective gatherings, demonstrations, and public circumstances, become political gestures of positioning.

The leading inquiries of the exhibition are: What role does the act of exhibiting (and therefore also exhibitions themselves) play in negotiating and claiming the existence and the acknowledgement of a plurality of legacies? In what ways does the exposure of bodies, archives, and emotions trigger processes of rehabilitation that involve not only artists, but also spectators?

The commissioned video and sound installations, sculptures, performances, and participatory art- works explore in various ways the politics of re- presentation of bodies, the need of decolonising memory, and the debated issue of whose legacy is transmitted through exhibitions, public memorials, repositories, visible traces in urban and digital spaces, and consequently which voices can be heard. Furthermore, the artworks reflect upon and the se- veral modes of participation of people in the com- munity life, through various forms of activisms, occupations, and mutual care. In that sense, play- ing with practices of inhabiting public and private spaces, and questioning architectures and bodies as borders between the inner and the outside, the artworks will be displayed in, and will create dialog with, the garden of Kulturhaus Schwartzsche Villa, as well as liminal spaces of the building itself (the atrium, balcony, and staircases).

Xposures is funded by Draußenstadt Fonds, SZ.

Diana Taylor (2003), The archive and the Repertoire. Performing Cultural Memories in the Americas, Duke University Press.

@xposures_openairexhibition

Photo credit: Jeremy Knowles

PRESS RELEASE

The Transformation of Silence

exhibition with Héla Ammar and Souad Mani

curated by Marianna Liosi

With a focus on persisting injustices in post-2011 Tunisia, The Transformation of Silence is an exhibition curated by Marianna Liosi that explores different forms of truth seeking, as well as the emotions linked to persisting social injustices that affect the country and its communities. Stemming from personal and societal feelings of rage, frustration, and disillusion, a variety of artworks by Tunisian artists Héla Ammar and Souad Mani seek to express dissent and political action. They provide an overview of the challenges that the Tunisian civil society has to face, from legacies of injustice, massive migration to severe pollution. Simultaneously, the works play as “glitches” in the current social and political system that can open the space for political change.

The show brings together performative videos, video installations, sculptures, photographs, as well as new productions and archive materials that trace trajectories through spaces, confronting historical moments and desires across times.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a speech held by Afro-American writer, feminist, professor and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, which is an invocation to take action and speak out.

The Transformation of Silence is one of the outcomes of Liosi’s 2021 fellowship on Memory & Justice, at Merian Center for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM), Tunis. The event is the result of, and has been made possible by the cooperation between MECAM and La Boîte (Tunis), with the kind support of Fatma Kilani.

Details:

Location: at Chapel of Saint-Monique, Rue Victor Hugo 2016, Carthage-Présidence, Tunis.

Duration of the event : From Friday 23 September, to Friday 14 October 2022.

Marianna Liosi is art curator, researcher, lecturer and cultural producer. She lives and works in Berlin. Marianna was MECAM Fellow 2021, within the Memory & Justice thematic cluster. She served as guest lecturer at the MA program Spatial Strategies at Weißensee Fine Arts Academy, Berlin (2021-2022) and as lecturer at LABA- The Free Fine Arts Academy in Rimini (Italy) (2019-2022). In 2020, she completed her PhD in Humanities, at the University of Ferrara, Italy. Her research interests focus on the question of engaged spectatorship, social networks as digital archives, affect and emotions, and digital memory as a tool of resistance. In the last years, Marianna has been focusing on education as curatorial practice. She has curated film screenings, workshops, exhibitions and she has lectured in art and academic institutions, such as HAU4, online, and MECAM’s Winter Talks #3, online (2022); European Month of Photography, Coculture, Berlin (2020); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019); 00 Bienal de la Habana, Havana, Superior Institute of Fine Arts (ISBA) Sousse, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris, D21 Kunstraum in Leipzig (2018); Between Bridges, Berlin (2016). Marianna has published essays in artists’ books and academic edited volumes.

Souad Mani is a transmedia artist. She lives and works in Sousse, Tunisia. Her work is transdisciplinary, and it unfolds through techno-poetic experiments. In a geo-pictorial and geo-relational approach, she addresses questions about the status of the artwork, the artist and the viewer in the era of collective intelligence and interconnected objects. From photography and video to Land Art and data visualizations, Souad Mani’s works examine the possible transformations of a medium or a landscape.Her work has been exhibited at the Casa Árabe, Madrid (2021), the Biennial of Photographers of the Contemporary Arab World at the Arab World Institute, Paris (2017), and at the MuCem, Marseille (2015). She took part in various festivals in Tunisia, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Czech and has participated in several group exhibitions in Tunisia.

Héla Ammar is a visual artist. She lives and works in Tunis, Tunisia. Besides her training in visual art, she holds a Phd in Law. Her photographs and installations address the stakes of memory. Identity and marginal communities are recurrent issues in her work. A selection of her photographs and installations is part of the permanent collection of the British Museum, London, the Arab World Institute, Paris, and the A. Slaoui Foundation’s Museum, Casablanca. Her work has been showcased in various international biennals and exhibitions such as Reflections at The British Museum, London (2021), The refugee week, featured by Shubbak Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2019), Beyond borders at the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2019), Kerkennah#01, Kerkennah (2018), The Biennal of the Contemporary Arab world photographers, Arab World Institute, Paris (2017), Bamako Encounters, Mali (2017, 2015), Dak’art Biennal, Dakar (2016, 2014), Dream City, Tunis (2017, 2012, 2010).

#helaammar #souadmani #laboite #tunisia #justice

The world is in crisis, bringing activists and protesters onto the streets and into the public eye. More than ever, activism relies on spectacle and visibility in order to be noticed in the era of globalized capitalism and networked media. At the same time, a growing number of artists employ creative strategies to critique the establishment, act in resistance, and demand change. Visual activism of this kind is not new, but it is rapidly evolving. This anthology presents 16 case-studies of visual activism from across the globe, providing an up-to-date picture of the impact of contemporary visual and art activism, and combining a scholarly interrogation of visual activism with an examination of how it works in practice. The case studies address a wide range of issues including human rights abuses; state violence; gender and sexuality; racism; migration; and climate breakdown. They examine a range of approaches from playful carnivalesque parades to extreme practices such as 'lip-sewing', and are drawn from a wide range of international contexts – from Europe and the US, to Iran, India, Pakistan, Tunisia, and China. This diverse scope enables readers to consider examples comparatively – noticing emerging trends and key differences to reveal how geopolitical and cultural factors play an important role in shaping activist practices. This rich and timely collection provides a fresh perspective on the possibilities, limitations and politics of visual activism, as activists, artists, and curators respond to the changing world around them in this most uncertain of times.

Among great scholars from the Global South and North, I was honored to contribute to it with the chapter, “Montage and Vernacular Spectatorship: the Role Played by YouTube Channel AnarChnowa as a Tool of Visual Activism in Post-14 January 2011 Tunisia.”

Digital commemoration and ephemeral memorials: performing the urban and online sphere

Paper by Marianna Liosi

Abstract

Through my paper, I investigate the digital sphere as a part of the public sphere. Within this framework, I will explore forms of commemoration that take place in the urban environment, and in the digital space. Questioning the permanence of memorials and its relationship with time and space, I will observe performance-based (performative) samples of memorials.

I will present two main case studies: the first is the Initiative 19. Februar Hanau, which was founded in the aftermath of the racist attack occurred in Hanau, Germany in February 2020. The initiative unfolds online through social networks and a website, as well as a widespread series of events that takes in different cities across the country.

The second consists in the performative action of Tunisian artist Souad Mani that results into the video De Mythes et de Choses. The artist illegally enters the phosphate washing plant of Redeyef, the infamous mining site in the south of Tunisia. The soundtrack of the video results from the transformation into sound of data recording high levels of pollution captured by a toolkit during the intrusion in the site.

Tracing the due differences between the types of memorials that these two cases studies embody, I will question how the digital shapes and affects the act of commemorating online and offline. Given the blurring borders between artist and militant interventions, I will analyze to what extent the digital commemoration can be interpreted as urban, and potentially activist, practice.

Digitale Raumstrategien /Digital Space Strategies

with artists: Ilghar Dadgostari, Fernanda Aloi, Jorge Baldeon, Sujatro Ghosh, Maricarmen Gutierrez, Tamara Margvelashvili, Cau Silva, Bo Xu, Karina Pino, Ricardo Sarmiento, Margarete Kiss and Leon Lechner, Hoayun Chung, Jongbin Park, Jae-Pyung Park, Marina Resende Santos, Graham Livingston, Sujatro Ghosh.

HAU4, 27 February -3 April 2022

A cooperation between weißensee kunsthochschule berlin and HAU Hebbel am Ufer.

The “Spatial Strategies” course at the Weißensee School of Art is concerned with artistic practice in urban space. Prof. Nasan Tur and Dr. Marianna Liosi have used the socio-political experiences under difficult circumstances, such as the pandemic, to develop a seminar series that considers digital space as part of the public sphere. In light of the capitalist structures of the internet, they ask whether and how artistic practices can overcome economic, gender and infrastructural barriers. What role does the audience play in this? What does artistic work in digital space mean if we assume that the public needs individual and collective care?

The individual or collective works presented at HAU4 take up a wide range of current questions. They are about personal and communal vulnerability as a trigger for social change, the potential and limits of digital space in addressing individual and societal memory and loss, the deconstruction of care within hierarchical structures, and the democratic accessibility and ecological sustainability of digital infrastructures. The proposed projects aim to reflect on the political transformations we can initiate in the public sphere in order to contribute to its permanent change.

Within the framework of the five-month cooperation, project ideas have emerged that the students present on the research platform HAU4. They show performances, text, video and sound material as well as social media interventions.

Digital Space Strategies, HAU4

Jongbin Park, Jae-Pyung Park, Lost Ghosts, 2022, video (still frame). Courtesy: the artists

WINTER TALK: Memory and its mediatisation

What are the potentials and the challenges of mediatizing memory? What futures can mediatised memory promise? Through a reflection on collective memory and its limits, this panel is both an attempt to answer these questions from a theoretical and artistic perspective, and also an invitation to reflect on the role played by media in the ethics of documenting, forgetting and re-narrating the past.

The Winter Talk takes place online via Zoom on Thursday, 03 February 2022, 18h30 – 20h00 (Tunisian and Central European time).

Guests:

Prof. Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow) and Mouna Karray participate in this panel as guest speakers and Dr Marianna Liosi (Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin / The Free Fine Arts Academy in Rimini) and Dr Rania Said (University of Massachusetts Boston) as discussants.

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