Mohamed Ali Ltaief’s “I Hear the Old Sound of the World’s Future”

Mohamed Ali Ltaief’s solo presentation at B7L9 is based on three years of research. Its central node is dedicated to recordings made, during World War I, by the Prussian Phonographic Commission at “Half-Moon Camp,” a social experiment set up for Muslim prisoners captured from French and British armies to persuade them to wage Jihad against their colonial oppressors in the name of German nationalism.

Ltaief’s problem, I think, is endemic to the field of artistic research: How to tell the story of the Prussian sound recordings without reinstating the violence of that capture, and the exoticism latent in an Orientalizing fascination with Islam? How to share what is gleaned from German and Tunisian archives while challenging the reasons that such material exists at all? How to speak for North Africa through the story of its people engulfed in a catastrophic European war? Ltaief’s artistic response is too close to the aesthetics of the archive and of neo-Orientalism for my taste, but his dilemma is a collectively held one for many working between North Africa and Europe.

“I Hear the Old Sound of the World’s Future” stumbles over the problem of how knowledge, once gathered, is staged. Occupying two rooms in the cavernous interior of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation’s project space in a suburb of Tunis, Ltaief’s research is presented in classical vitrines painted a deep gray or bright red. Maps are pinned to the floor with fragments of picturesque ceramic tiles. Two archival photographs silk-screened in high contrast on large white textiles hang from the ceiling. They are accompanied by neatly organized rhizomatic diagrams labeled with undated, unannotated political moments from the twentieth century—Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT), for example—alongside events in the world of music and sound, such as Richard Karutz’s recordings of a Tunisian expedition, probably from 1906. A two-channel video installation is positioned behind sumptuous red curtains in an adjacent black box.

Consultable books are positioned on a low plinth painted the same deep red, which bears a broad spectrum of connotations: military uniforms—especially in combination with the muted grays used elsewhere in the exhibition design—the Communist Party, revolutionary movements across the globe, and also luxurious event spaces like the opera, an association reinforced by the heavy fabric that brackets the entrance to Ltaief’s video installation. The books, like the exhibition’s design palate, signal criticality without specificity. For example, Jonathan Sterne’s theoretically provocative archeological approach to the medium of sound, The Audible Past (2003) is present, but not Brian Larkin’s Signal and Noise (2008), which is a groundbreaking refusal of Eurocentric studies like Sterne’s, and is focused on the sonic ecosystem of Kano, a predominantly Muslim city in Nigeria. In short, the exhibition uses the symbolic architecture of epistemological authority and its echo in a bibliographic framework without meaningfully deconstructing that authority. 

There is one image in the open installation that feels particularly complicated in an exhibition about North African sound: an archival photograph of Frantz Fanon entitled simply “The Black Gaze.” The shot depicts Fanon gazing at something outside the frame. The way the photograph is installed, he is positioned as looking out over the collected detritus of European capaciousness. But who is Fanon here? The volunteer to the Free French Forces who eagerly joined the Allies in order to leave Martinique in 1944, only to be disgusted by racist military strategy in the field and colonial racism when quartered? The psychiatrist and clinician based in Tunis during the Algerian War of Liberation who worked openly for the Front de Libération Nationale for the last five years of his life, struggling to publish Wretched of the Earth (1961) before he succumbed to leukemia? Or does this Black Gaze belong to the young doctor studying in Lyon in the late 1940s and early 1950s, constantly reminded of his non-inclusion into the French republican and humanist ideals of equality? I resist the idea of Fanon as a transhistorical, transethnic emblem of revolutionary solidarity in this context: it feels too generic and instrumental a reference for a thinker so deeply opposed to indigenous cultural practices as self-exoticizing.

This dissonance between aesthetic choices and the complexity of decolonial history persists with the video installation after which the exhibition is titled. It combines archival images from Half-Moon Camp and the actual locations in which these materials rest now, alongside unidentified footage of a solitary figure leading sheep up an arid hillside. We see people, ostensibly North Africans, dancing in the center of a muddy field with cloth tents in the background. We see ceramic jars lined up on metal archive shelves with neat white tags attached to them. Footage of early twentieth-century bureaucratic documents flashes across the screen too fast to read, but long enough to register as a form of administrative violence. Though the exhibition guide explains that there are subtle performances of resistance in the soundtrack, there is no indication that I can hear that the recorded sound differs from ethnographic standards for the time; their violence is undeniable, but submerged in the form of their presentation.

I am reminded throughout the exhibition of Stefania Pandolfo’s startling work on the voice in twentieth-century Morocco, and particularly her reading of a young woman’s song as her way of producing a witness for an experience of trauma, which provides an experimental analysis of how to circumvent the most egregious forms of colonial reenactment.1 Though Pandolfo is not Moroccan and works within an ethnographic paradigm that inherits the legacy of violence Ltaief would reject, my sense is that a foray into North African feminist détournement would lend this urgently needed artistic research some nuance.