ABSTRACT
Héla Ammar is a feminist, a visual artist, a jurist and a professor of law at the University of Tunis. This chapter focuses on Ammar’s 2014 photographic installation Tarz, the Arabic word for ‘embroidery’. Tarz combines Ammar’s photographs taken during the Tunisian revolution with old photographs and official documents chronicling historical landmark events. Ammar’s selection and arrangement of old and contemporary photographs, along with her decision to desaturate more recent photographs in order to give them a weathered appearance, artificially recreate a space of historical continuity. In order to counteract national and personal memory’s fragmentation, Ammar also embroiders photographs’ details with a red thread. Enhancing connection between images, this thread evokes both the Tunisian flag and martyrs’ blood. As Ammar explains, embroidery in Tarz recalls women’s skills and qualities such as ‘time, patience, self-sacrifice, even, and precision’, which are paramount to understanding the complex and long political process Tunisians endured in their efforts to attaining democracy. Most importantly, by supporting a different pace of time, Ammar’s use of embroidery in photographs favours reflection and opens imaginative spaces within the photograph that are essential to envisioning alternative histories. Indeed, the act of embroidering photographs, I argue, rails against historical dispossession and encourages a dialogue between personal and collective memories. Furthermore, while grappling with questions of Tunisian historical memory, transmission and dispossession, Tarz also underscores the importance of counteracting historical fragmentation by means of ordinary acts of caring that the tactile aspects of embroidery evoke.
