Des gestes de nos mondes — Frac île-de-france, les Réserves — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 5 days: September 13 → November 14, 2026

Des gestes de nos mondes brings together works from the Frac Île-de-France collection and creations by artists based in Tunisia or hailing from the southern shore of the Mediterranean. First presented at Les Réserves in Romainville and then in 2027 at 32bis in Tunis, the exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the two institutions.

Throughout the exhibition, photographs, videos, sculptures, textiles, archival materials, objects, and everyday gestures come together to form a landscape of narratives where family histories, memories, migrations, languages, craftsmanship, and legacies intertwine. The artists are less interested in the archive as a frozen trace of the past than in what it continues to produce in the present: what it transmits, what it transforms, and what it allows to disappear.

The works explore the many ways in which memory is constructed. Some draw on documents or testimonies; others reinvent fragments of history, shift perspectives, or give voice to narratives that have long remained on the margins. All question what constitutes memory: a repeated gesture, a photograph, a material, a passed-down word, a landscape, or an absence.

Here, the Mediterranean appears not as a border or a single territory, but as a space crisscrossed by multiple flows, movements, and imaginaries. Stories intersect, echo one another, and sometimes contradict each other. They trace a geography made up as much of connections as of distances.

Rather than freezing the past in place, Des gestes de nos mondes invites us to view the archive as a living entity, always open to reinterpretation. The works do not seek to impose a single narrative; instead, they open up a space where different voices coexist, engage in dialogue, and shift our perspective.

Curators : Hela Djobbi, Salma Kossemtini and Cindy Olohou