INTERVIEW Bettina Pelz
PUBLISHED 3 AUG 26
Hamza is a Tunisian artist joining SEE DJERBA for the first time. His artistic practice is rooted in still and moving images, in calligraphy and graphic design; his concepts combine personal reflections and philosophical knowledge, spiritual experience and esthetic exploration.
// How did you find the SEE DJERBA community? And why did you decide to join?
I found SEE DJERBA through my search for festivals engaging with media art in a Tunisian context specifically. I wanted a platform that understood the local, not just an international circuit that happened to stop in Tunisia. I joined because it offered a public setting rather than a purely academic one, and also a chance to test “HOUWA…” PROJECT outside the seminar room where it was born.
// You describe yourself as a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Carthage, working across photography, video, graphic design, and contemporary Arabic calligraphy. What pushed you toward this hybrid practice instead of specializing in a single medium?
No single medium could hold what I was trying to say or make. Photography freezes a moment but can’t carry duration; graphic design and calligraphy give me control over form and script but not time; video lets me work with rhythm, sound, and disappearance together. I move between them depending on what the idea needs, rather than starting from a medium and looking for a subject to fit it.
// You studied plastic arts at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts. How did your training there shape your understanding of what an “artist” can be, and what did you have to unlearn or redefine after graduation?
My training gave me technical grounding across media, but it also handed me an implicit hierarchy: the “serious” artist makes objects, and everything else (teaching, commissioned design, applied work) is secondary. What I had to unlearn was that separation. Some of my clearest thinking has come out of supposedly “minor” work, teaching, a client project, not despite it being applied, but because it forced discipline and clarity I didn’t always have in purely personal work.
// You work with installation, exhibition, and performance formats as well as applied visual projects with brands and institutions. How do you navigate between artistic research and commissioned work?
I keep them in dialogue rather than in separate boxes. Commissioned and institutional projects have deadlines and constraints that sharpen my formal thinking; research work, like my master’s project, gives me the time and license to go slower and deeper. I try not to let one degrade the other, commissioned work doesn’t get less care, and research doesn’t get to be an excuse for vagueness.
// Which moment of the creative process do you enjoy the most?
The edit and the process, specifically the point where disparate material starts to reveal a structure I hadn’t fully planned in advance. That’s when a project stops being a collection of decisions and starts to have its own internal logic.
// You mention creating installations, performances, and visual projects for institutions. What has been the most challenging site or context you’ve worked in, and what did that experience change in your practice?
Filming inside the Aissawa ritual for “HOUWA…” PROJECT, in Sidi Bou Saïd. The challenge wasn’t logistical, it was ethical, how to hold a camera inside a sacred, participatory space without turning it into a spectacle for outsiders. That tension between documentation and participation didn’t just complicate the shoot; it became the actual conceptual core of the piece, and it changed how I approach any project involving ritual or community practice since.
// You’ve been teaching photography and video for over 13 years, running workshops in painting, calligraphy, photography, graphology, and videography. How does teaching feed back into your own art-making?
Teaching forces me to articulate things I otherwise only know intuitively. Explaining a concept to a student, why a composition works, what a mark makes me test my own assumptions out loud, and that discipline of explanation often clarifies problems I’m working through privately in my own pieces.
// What is a good audience for you?
One that’s willing to slow down and sit with ambiguity rather than demanding immediate legibility, someone who can tolerate not fully “getting” a work in the moment and trust that the experience itself is the point.
// Please describe the work you will bring to SEE DJERBA. What is the core idea?
The short answer: HOUWA… PROJECT (هو…) is a 2’08” film-montage exploring the Aissawia Sufi brotherhood’s ritual, filmed in Sidi Bou Saïd. It’s structured around Fibonacci sequences, with a golden-ratio threshold at 61.8% of the film marking a moment of silence and annihilation tajalli (revelation). Formally it’s 2.35:1 with surround sound; conceptually it sits at the tension between embodiment and invisibility, transformation, and the difficulty of documenting a sacred practice without simply consuming it as image.
The long answer: The Visible and the Invisible in Aïssaouia Rituals: Video Montage Between Dhikr and Revelation.
This work emerges from an immersion in Aïssaouia rituals, not to document or preserve them, but to explore what resists representation. While the camera captures gestures, bodies, rhythm, smoke, and light, an invisible dimension always remains beyond the image. The project seeks to approach this space rather than explain it. Through video montage, repetition, layering, dissolution, and temporal shifts transform the image into a field of perception. The repetition of dhikr, the pulse of the bendir, immersive sound, and changing luminosities invite the viewer to experience the image rather than simply observe it. Smoke, blurring, emergence, and disappearance are not visual effects but the structure of the work itself, where the visible continuously arises from and returns to the invisible. The image becomes a threshold between presence and absence, body and spirituality, memory and experience.
This project considers video as a medium capable of generating perceptual and spiritual awareness. It is not what is shown that matters most, but what emerges between images—in silence, rhythm, repetition, and breath. The visible is only a doorway. The image begins to reveal what cannot be represented.
// What were your thoughts when you saw this year’s theme “AKROS – From Encounter to Entanglement?
It resonated immediately with the Aissawa order’s own history. A brotherhood whose lineage is itself a story of migration and encounter, from Meknès into Tunisia, and with what the ritual (dhikr) does on a bodily level: bring people into contact with each other and with something beyond themselves without full merger. “Entanglement” felt more accurate than “fusion” for describing both the ritual and the film.
// Do you think that your artwork contributes to the long-term project of decolonizing our mindsets?
I’d rather not overstate it, but I do try to resist the reflex of presenting Sufi ritual as folklore for an outside gaze. With “HOUWA…” PROJECT I wanted the theoretical frame to draw as much on Al-Ghazali as on Merleau-Ponty or Deleuze, so the work isn’t explained to a Western frame but allowed to hold its own philosophical ground.
// In a region where art scenes are often described in terms of “emergence” or “renewal,” how do you position yourself: as part of a Tunisian scene, a North African network, or a more global contemporary field?
I don’t fully settle into one category. I’m rooted in a Tunisian context. “HOUWA…” PROJECT couldn’t exist without Sidi Bou Saïd and this specific religious lineage, but I think and work with a broader set of references, from Tarkovsky to Gary Hill. I’d rather sit at that crossing point than claim a single, tidy identity.
// We would be so happy to see you in Djerba. Will you manage to come?
Yes, I’m planning to be there to attend all the festival’s days.
// We are so happy to hear that. We are looking forward to discussing with you how your work can find its space in Djerba.