What might Carthage represent today, this legendary city founded by the Phoenicians and razed to the ground by the Romans to impose their reign on North Africa and eliminate the competing worldview that it embodied? The writer and theoretician Édouard Glissant dreamt of Carthage as a city of crossroads and encounters, rich in different cultures, an early site of ‘creolisation’ where this bringing together of diverse elements could create new cultural possibilities, greater than any sum of the parts. The first section of Le sel noir (1956) is dedicated to the cosmopolitan metropolis, and – like many others before and since – he wondered speculatively in a paper entitled ‘Et si Carthage...?’: ‘What if Carthage had not been destroyed?’ What kind of space could the Mediterranean have become if Carthage had continued to exist as a generative force in counterbalance to Rome?
Nidhal Chamekh takes Glissant’s question and turns it on its head, affirming the latent power of the multiverse of paths untold and suppressed in the histories of the ‘victors’ and the ‘vanquished’, of triumphs and sackings. His sculptural assemblage Masque noir, tête de Niobides (2023) literally figures the merging of African and Greco-Roman cultures and the compression of the ancient history of Northern Africa and Southern Europe. The affirmation of the Roman presence through interpretations of archaeological traces, underlining its extent and the pervasiveness of its influence, contributed to justifying the French presence and methods in the territories they occupied, and later also the Italian colonial presence. Both positioned themselves as heirs to the Romans, legitimately unfolding their predestination to empire and claiming their rights around the shores of Mare Nostrum, as can be clearly read in Carmine Gallone’s film of the fascist period in Italy Scipione l’Africano (1937). In the sculpture Calchi facciale (2023), Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a key actor in the establishment of the Code noir which defined conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire, bears an anthropological facial cast. Chamekh here references the justifications for colonial expropriation laid out through the invention of ‘racial sciences’ in Europe, running in parallel to the affirmation of a genealogy traced to Greek and Roman antiquity in the development of European Humanism —which cloaked under its ideology of universalism the reality of the exclusion of most of humanity from its protections and rights. In his first large drawing from the series et si Carthage? (2023), Chamekh brings together cultural difference. In Chamekh’s research underlying this body of work, he was interested in making visible the ancient influences of North Africa on Roman antiquity. Figures such as the horned deity Ammon draw together Berber, Phoenician, Egyptian and Roman gods. Carthage was crushed by Rome, yet subsequently the province of Africa Romana became very important in Roman trade, culture and indeed politics, notably through the African Emperor Septimius Severus and his dynasty. Roman rule worked to integrate the best of what was found in the provinces; Chamekh underlines how Carthage itself persists in Rome and elsewhere through a plethora of cultural and iconographic influences.
Chamekh reminds us that the resilience of the Punic metropolis, of which it is said that the very earth was salted by the Roman troops so that it might never rise again, can also be read in the eyes of the vanquished and exiled. Today it can be seen in the determination
of all those who, in crossing the Mediterranean, rebel against the structural mechanisms of the globalised economy, developed across long periods of imperial domination and colonial extraction to concentrate wealth in the hands of the northern few. Chamekh’s Ismaël and Legs with helmet (both from 2023) place plaster-fragments of images and text evoking the long history of the looting of obelisks and other sculptures from North Africa for the glorification of European regimes and the naturalisation of their imperial power. He gives particular attention to the 1935 Italian theft of an important historical stele from Axum in Ethiopia that was shipped to Naples in pieces before being reassembled and erected in Porta Capena Square in Rome in front of the Ministry of Italian Africa. Ethiopian demands for restitution of the Axum stele continued for over half a century before this important piece of cultural heritage was returned and reinstalled.
Faced with these histories, Chamekh seeks to translate, in his assemblages of heterogeneous elements, the dissonances, discontinuities and hybridisations that they contain. He is interested in how images, whether historical or current, are not static, but are rather constantly redefining and redeploying themselves across visual culture, literature, the natural and human sciences and other fields. While generally this redeployment acts to underpin and reinforce existing historical and political tropes, there is also a potential for this montage process to contribute to rethinking and reactivating the past in the present. One of the counter histories that Chamekh bring to the fore in
cast sections of bodies into relationship with forms of restraint and violence. This second line of research into exile and the displacement of African communities runs through the exhibition in parallel to the reflection on Carthage and Rome.
The sculpture X (2023) that welcomes visitors on the first wall of the show presents a copy modelled in clay of an ancient Punic mask-like funerary object (in the collection of the Bardo Museum in Tunis), clad in a ‘hoodie’, a piece of clothing that can be drawn down to shield the face from harsh weather or recognition. A tribute to David Hammons’ ‘In the Hood’ (1993), the work draws together the structural racismand policing experienced by black men in the Unites States with that experienced by exiles from the African continent in Europe. The Punic face forms a disturbing smile under the hoodie, speaking to movements of people across the millennia. Hidden in Hammons there is also the god Ammon. The culmination of a major project that has been at the heart of his artistic activity for several years, including during his period as a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome (2021-2022), Chamekh’s body of work is informed by detailed iconographic research. The constellations of images this generates are fundamental to his process of juxtaposing, reworking and reassembling fragments. the exhibition is that of Mezwed music as a form of marginalised cultural production that has been linked to exile in the songs of its leading exponents such as Hedi Guella, whose 1984 album Périples, features the compositions ‘Carte d’identité’, ‘Pays chagrin’ and ‘Le bateau de l’immigration’. Chamekh also points to its discovery by black jazz musicians including Don Cherry whose encounters with Mezwed musicians during a visit to Tunis are recorded in the film Noon in Tunisia (1969). Instruments associated with this musical form, a type of bagpipe and a drum, feature in the sculpturesCrouching Venus with tabla and Mezoued and hands (both from 2024).
In a film directed by Jean-Denis Bonan, Carthage Édouard Glissant (2006) that is presented within the exhibition, Glissant states that he hopes the world may see a meeting between the spiritual powers of polytheistic philosophies and the spiritual powers of monotheistic philosophies, so as to overcome its antinomies and devastating conflicts. When Glissant first set foot on Carthaginian soil, he had asked what other histories might have unfolded if this great multicultural centre had not been destroyed — if Rome has not rolled out its project to crush African resistance and dominate the Mediterranean, what other lights might have been ‘And what if Carthage...’ brings together an articulated series of works including large-format drawings on structures made of scaffolding-like elements; sculptures formed from plaster casts of objects, bodies and other sculptures, assembled with found objects (from musical instruments to masks); transfers on fabric and on paper; and a rich archive of research materials from books, film and music to an extensive wall-based cartography of concepts and images — forming together a heterogeneous ensemble in which the fragment and the marginal detail are important. In the words of the artist speaking of his process of artistic research and assemblage:
‘The elements retain traces of their original worlds and cannot be assimilated into a visual totality. It’s a practice of montage that introduces the multiple, the diverse and the hybrid. The images confront, connect and repel each other.’
Filling out his fields of research straddling Mediterranean antiquity to contemporary crossings and exile, is Chamekh’s consideration of how modernity viewed antiquity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when colonial ideology had a profound effect on the writing born and thrived on the earth. We could also ask together with Nidhal Chamekh: what other lives might have unfolded for the exilés of whom Glissant’s fellow traveller Patrick Chamoiseu speaks in Frères migrants. In the exhibition, Chamekh’s speculative constellations activate the potential of these other lights, pointing to their parallel existence and the insights they offer into the world’s multiple pasts, presents and futures.
Kathryn Weir
