With a long name like this: Siwa Economat Redeyef & Bégayer, this Franco-Tunisian collective deserves some explanation.
In our series of names that are impossible to remember, unless you train hard, we name…: Siwa Économat Redeyef…& Begayer (SERB). A mythological animal with four heads, we met them recently, during the inauguration of the third place, anonymous for the moment, by the visual artist Guillaume Fosse, next door to the Biocoop at Perpignan station. Invited for the week by another third place in Estagel called “La Remission” and represented by Soledad Zarka, SERB carried out a roaming program in the department to give an opportunity to appreciate this trance in the form of a frenetic and alchemical laboratory.
The prelude to the Arab Spring
It is with Yagoutha Belgacem, of Tunisian origin living in Paris and working in artistic production, that we listen to his explanations on the four entities that form the collective. The genesis starts from the town of Redeyef. Mushroom town, which grew up around the phosphate mines. Worker, committed, unionized, cosmopolitan, the 2008 uprising in Redeyef, following repeated corruption in the phosphate company in the Gafsa mining basin, was then followed throughout the country. A popular movement to combat the inequalities that were making Tunisia bloodless, a prelude to the multiple Arab springs that would result. Yagoutha therefore returned home in 2011, taking advantage of this wind of freedom bringing hope to a youth ostracized and undermined by unemployment. What could be better than in Redeyef, in this vortex of protest, to meet the population, Tunisian artists and its 24…,000 self-managed inhabitants – a sort of Tunisian commune – and participate in this political, artistic laboratory, where music, theater, dance, cinema, video, performances…
Dangerous for those in power
Long-term work, where shepherds, masons and workers abandon everyday tools to arm themselves with bendir, daf (large drums), gasba flute and songs imbued with Sufi mysticism. Siwa is this lab, the association which manages this unique editorial line between Paris and Gafsa, in Tunisia. It was only in 2014 that they undertook to rehabilitate the Redeyef commissary (former workers’ store) to transform it into a place of alternative living and creation open to all. A model, underlines Yagoutha, for many other associations, in perpetual movement, inclusive for the population and therefore dangerous for the current power in place, which does not hesitate to hinder the smooth running of the whole.
Musical syncretism
The performance of SERB that we had the pleasure of enjoying during the inauguration of the third venue “no name” integrates traditional Tunisian music with experimental electro-noise features brought by the last of the four entities…: Begayer.
Group of noisy and experimental musicians from Grenoble, practicing the recovery of objects, tinkering with instruments, and artistic cooperation since 2023 with the musicians of Redeyef. Loup, singer, multi-instrumentalist, splits himself in two with his Tunisian sidekicks and his Grenoble punks to generate these crossed practices which will reach our ears during the concert. We then obtain this enjoyable mix of stambali trance (cult of therapeutic possession), traditional Berber instrumentation, Sufi singing, haunted dance against a background of electro mix and polyphony of the sands. A musical syncretism to discover for those who are not afraid of anything.
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