A Franco-Tunisian urban psychoanalysis team made up of students from the Ecole de l’Acteur of Tunisian National Theatre (TNT), accompanied by specialists from the Agence Nationale de Psychanalyse Urbaine (ANPU) psychoanalyzed Tunis in June 2015.
This team of 16 specialists criss-crossed the streets of Tunis to observe what we no longer see, out of habit, of our urban space following ANPU observation protocols.
At the same time, over a month of meticulous media analysis was carried out to “observe the observers too”. Following this, three Divan Operations were organized in three neighborhoods: Halfaouine, La Goulette and Les Berges du Lac. Passers-by were invited by TNT student actors to lie down on deckchairs to answer a questionnaire about the city of Tunis.
Meetings with experts were also scheduled: Noureddine Kridis, PhD in communication psychology, Elyes Hasni, specialist in sustainable architecture, Myriam Fadhel and Othman Khaled, a duo of utopian architects, Anouar Labidi, urban photographer, Azyz Amami, activist and cyber-activist, and Kmar Bendana, PhD in history, added a more “theoretical” touch to the experience.
This was followed by long and bitter debates between the urban psychoanalysts around the proposed diagnoses and treatments, right up to the restitution of the final results in Place Halfaouine, on the evening of Friday June 19, 2015.
This process between performance and reality enabled the team of urban psychoanalysts to (re)discover this city and its inhabitants and identify it from the inside, based on its streets, activities, energies and ills.
In their work of observation and analysis, the team was traversed by the city, a task that enabled them to stop being “outsiders” and contemplate it as a phenomenon. The urban psychoanalysts chose to experiment with the city, and all identified a problem of duality, hence the need for multi-level “grafting” to overcome the diagnosed poly-schizophrenia. Both narcissistic and depressive, Tunis needs to reconcile with itself?
