This website presents my artistic research What Comes After the Ashes.
The material is intentionally open and unedited, operating as a space for ongoing exchange.
Rym Hayouni, in collaboration with Aymen Amami on soundscaping - Youssef Baklouti storytelling and mythology research
Website: https://archivedpractices.com/what-comes-after-the-ahes
Framework - Samples from my research journal - Samples of photographs
The extractivist industries treat the Earth as a mere “subterranean” resource to be exhausted. Green hydrogen pipelines, phosphate mines, and salt lakes function as the physical “veins” of an imperialist project that promises to achieve a “heaven on earth” through the destruction of the Earth itself.
Extractivism is not only the extraction of minerals; it is also a secular project that began with the colonial conquest of the ground. The land was depicted as vast and empty, stripped of its spirits and myths, reduced to a neutral surface available for mining and grabbing.
And while these geologies are being stripped of their cosmologies, local fables, chants, dialects, and oral traditions remain crowded with creatures: monsters, ghosts, dragons, subterranean entities. A phantasmagoric and mythological vocabulary persists, opposing the neutralization of the land.
The disenchantment made the intensified extraction of land and underground resources possible.
From the moment subterranean demons were declared non-existent, a deep fracture emerged in what could be perceived, inhabited, and recognized as living ground. This cosmological rupture has had concrete climatic and territorial consequences.
This artistic research moves against desertification, calling upon myth and the phantasmagorical register to re-mystify the soil.
While phosphate fertilizers green the ‘European garden’, green hydrogen is celebrated as a major ecological transition, and shale gas sustains the modernist promise of comfort and growth, in the south of the Mediterranean the mining and agrochemical industries that produce these materials accelerate processes of ecological and territorial disasters. Their chemical transformations rely on highly toxic compounds that destroy habitats and ecosystems. Together, these interdependent processes produce what can be described as geo-cultural desertification: a condition in which material extraction and representational erasure operate simultaneously.
It is the paradox of extraction: the production of life and progress through continuous operations of desertification.
This theoretical framework draws on the thought of Mohamed Amer Meziane and in particular to his book
(Des empires sous la terre: Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation) which reads extractivism as a cosmological project: one that declares the earth devoid of all spirit.*
My point of departure was a phosphogypsum tailings.
It is a primary industrial waste stack produced during chemical phosphate processing.
Phosphogypsum (PG) is an industrial solid by-product generated during the production of phosphate fertilizers through a chemical process known as the “wet process.” This process produces large quantities of PG.
Phosphogypsum is mainly composed of calcium sulfate dihydrate (CaSO₄·2H₂O), with impurities such as heavy metals, rare earth elements, and naturally occurring radioactive materials.
In addition to discharges into receiving water bodies, the process leaves behind vast tailings stacks.
The material forms large, uneven deposits that extend across the landscape and can resemble low hills or embankments.
The surface is pale, very dry, and compact. It is stable underfoot in most areas, while remaining exposed to wind and erosion.
Machinery residues are present on site.
Some creatures emerging from phosphogypsum tailings, Tunisia, 2026
mythodological notes:
I approach myth as entangled with bureaucracy, labor, contaminationm chemical residue, bodies, speech, dialects, violence and territory.
The mine site becomes animated, generating its own vocabulary.
The “green transition”, is itself mythological:
- narratives of salvation
- redemption
- paradise on earth
- infinite growth
- purification
Extractivism didn’t cancel cosmologies, it displaced them and replaced them with modern / secular narratives.
myths as territorial systems
myths as ecological memory
myths as warning structures
myths as survival language
myths as perception systems
People crossing a heavily polluted field, Gabes, 2026
exemples of local expressions to designate the polluting factories:
« كيف يتكلم علينا البرط »
‘when the port lashes out’
« العفريت قام»
The ʿifrit has risen
reversed miner posture gestures:
carrying
digging
waiting
dragging
witnessing
listening
repeating
losing orientation
extraction postures
the ifritt¹ tailings - phosphogypsum tailings, Tunisia, 2026
ghost beach, Tunisia 2026
across this point things would have shifted
an echo of having always been somewhere
near the end
in the extracted field where we are
nothing will ever be the same nothing
ever was
from something towards nothing
and there is no way
of saying there was no one here
walking alone
decades or a few hours ago
i am still.
In this artistic research, the studio becomes an inverted extraction site. Landscapes, soundscapes, gestures, stories, and linguistic fragments are brought in, laid out, sifted through, and redistributed. I treat them as sedimented matter carrying traces of ecological destruction, colonial violence, and cosmological erasure. Through processes of repetition, dislocation and superimposition, the work reverses the direction of extraction, not toward the removal of resources, but toward a repopulation of the soil.
Working through visual and performative essays, I place my body in the posture of a miner. I look at what is dug out of the ground, while asking what remains embedded within it. I approach soils, rocks, minerals, and industrial residues as wild archives holding evidence of what extractive industries attempted to neutralize: spirits, monsters, warrior queens, subterranean entities, and non-human presences
I attempt to read the strata as a contested field of memory, where geological matter, industrial infrastructure, and mythological imaginaries operate together, not as representation or folklore, but as epistemic tools through which damaged landscapes can be re-entered and re-inhabited.
Throughout the residency, I excavate, fragment, contaminate, assemble, and sediment images, texts, gestures, field recordings, industrial debris, and oral narratives. I allow these materials to act upon one another, generating unstable relations between document, fiction, choreography, and testimony. Gradually, a performative palimpsest emerges: a stratified narrative structure where multiple temporalities, territorial memories, and extractive residues remain simultaneously active.
This process takes form in a publication conceived not as documentation, but as a living field archive: a fragmented and sedimented object through which the project continues to circulate. The public presentation becomes its spatial activation through a performative essay in which the body, materials, voices, and industrial remnants form the landscape.
Landscape Guardian, Tunisia, 2026 — a single unidentified object in an emptied landscape
3roug, Tunisia, 2026
Labor, Gabès, 2026: factory outside soundscape
(zoom in)
stills from the video “Tne Point Of Departure“ phosphogypsum tailings, Tunisia, 2026
sub-bass field from the industrial zone’s, Gabes 2026
- A state-owned company responsible for processing phosphates mined in Tunisia into chemical products (phosphoric acid, fertilizers), most of which are intended for export
- The ʿifrit, from North African cosmologies, is a powerful type of jinn. Compressed combustion. Strategic, dwelling in subterranean spaces, ruins, mines, abandoned zones. Not a spirit of nature, but of its decay.
- Plural of Djinn in tunisian dialects “smokeless” beings of fire, they inhabit a world parallel to that of humans and play a major role in the region’s beliefs, literature, and popular culture.
Bakhara Over the Fishermen’s Talk
Fishing boat in contaminated water, Gabes, 2026
Rust runoff, Tunisia, 2026 — corrosion in water flow
لا أتكلم عن الأرض
I do not speak about the earth
بل معها
but with it
أحفر بيدي
I dig with my hands
في الطبقات المطوية
through folded layers
واحدة داخل الأخرى
inside one another
استمع إلى ذاكرتي الممزقة
i listen to my torn memoryكم يدوم
how long
الطريق
does the road last
أمشي
وكلما وصلت
بدأتُ ثانيةً
وكلما وصلت
بدأتُ ثانيةً
and each time I arrive
I begin again
I begin again
Activist Kheireddin Ben Debbia explains the illnesses commonly affecting fishermen heavily exposed to fluorine contamination along the coast.