Salle d'écoute

Filmed in Tunis, 2023

The listening room in downtown Tunis is a space for women to speak and be heard. It’s a comfortable room, without distractions, a sanctuary in the city. There, women find a space in which to share lived experiences of sexual harassment, bullying and other forms of gendered violence, voicing accounts ordinarily silenced or discredited. In this space they are believed and find psycho-social and legal support without judgement or charge.

Recorded on site, the audio accounts shared in this cycle reflect the precaution and self-care asserted by the collaborating survivors, who collectively chose to withhold their names and physical identities. Here, the urgent work of speaking-out is strategically re-routed through femme-centric channels of security and accountability, re-asserting the quieter (but no less radical) political labour of listening.

The Association Tunisienne Des Femmes Démocrates (ATFD) is a longstanding feminist organisation that actively counters legal structures and socio-religious mores that recycle the precarity and diminished life opportunities of women and gender-diverse people in Tunisia. Founded by the ATFD in 1993, the listening room runs five days a week. It is seldom unoccupied.

Offerings

A woman who chooses to withhold her name (withheld)

A woman who chooses to withhold her name (withheld)

A woman who chooses to withhold her name (withheld)

A mother who chooses to withhold her name for the sake of her daughter (withheld)