Biography

Ahmed Ben Abid is a Tunisian multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of dance, sound, and media art. His practice explores migration, identity, resilience, and collective memory, approaching the body as a living archive where personal experience intersects with social and political histories.

He studied Media Engineering and Multimedia Design at the Higher Institute of Multimedia Arts of Manouba, alongside dance interpretation at the Mediterranean Center for Contemporary Dance. This dual background informs his interdisciplinary approach, allowing him to combine physical performance, sound creation, and digital experimentation. Ahmed’s artistic research is deeply influenced by his upbringing in Djbal Lahmer, a marginalized neighborhood in Tunis, and by the post-revolutionary context marked by political instability and disillusionment among Tunisian youth. His work examines how the body absorbs, stores, and transforms lived experiences shaped by social tension, migration, and historical memory.

His practice brings together choreography, sound recording and design, and visual experimentation. He works with archival materials such as cassette tapes, personal recordings, and environmental sounds, reactivating them as carriers of memory. In parallel, he experiments with algorithmic processes using Python to create generative visual systems that interact with movement and sound, forming immersive performance environments.

Artistic project

Tracked / Unplaced is a video installation extracted from my ongoing choreographic research project Unknown Sea — كيف سأخبر البحر أننا نغرق على اليابسة. It investigates migration, surveillance, and the condition of being visible without belonging.
The project is built around a low-tech mobile system: a Python-based face-tracking algorithm running on a Raspberry Pi. Developed through DIY experimentation and workshops in Tunis, the system detects faces in real time and generates unstable visual and textual outputs displayed on screens in public space. Faces are fragmented, delayed, duplicated, or partially erased. Images never stabilize, resisting identification and permanence. Rather than confirming recognition, the technology exposes tensions between visibility, control, and displacement.
The work reflects a dominant narrative in Tunisia known as الهروب من الحفرة (“escaping the hole”), the belief that departure is the only possible future. Since 2011, political instability and economic precarity have intensified this logic, pushing many young people toward migration or psychological withdrawal. Tracked / Unplaced focuses on suspension rather than movement: being present in a place while remaining socially, politically, or symbolically unplaced.
The installation functions autonomously. Passersby activate the system through their presence, generating a shifting audiovisual environment that echoes everyday mechanisms of surveillance in contemporary urban space.

Format: installation

Size of audience: There is no fixed audience size, as engagement depends on the flow of people in the space.

Specific location: crowded square

Timing/duration: 45 min