From September 29 to October 27, 2025, Welcome to "Imaginary Ruins" - Between Memory, Dream, and Reinvention
A collective exhibition inaugurating the new artistic season of the Al Kitab Bookstore.
The Press —
Thus begins "Imaginary Ruins", a collective exhibition that inaugurates the new artistic season of the Al Kitab Bookstore. A sensitive proposition, traversed by the echoes of a still-living past, which draws its inspiration from "Tunisian Antiquity", a work by historian Samir Aounallah.
However, here, there is no frozen reconstitution, no fixed gaze on the ruins. What is proposed to us is a journey between memory and invention, where ancient stones regain their breath. The remnants come alive again, whispering forgotten stories, stretching towards our present with a strange grace. They are no longer silent witnesses; they become living matter, a space for creation.
The invited artists reinterpret this plural heritage with assumed freedom. Carthage, Utique, Zama, Dougga - so many names that reappear like thresholds to cross, mental landscapes to reconfigure. The places resurface, not as dead ruins, but as fertile fields for the imagination. Alongside these ancient geographies, there are also symbolic objects: pottery, frescoes, amulets, jewelry... which metamorphose under their hands: fragments of everyday life become new visions.
Historical or legendary figures, from Dido to Hannibal, from Numidian kings to the anonymous people who populated the ancient cities, traverse the works like benevolent shadows. They sometimes fade away, then return, in other forms, sliding from one myth to an emotion, from a collective memory to a contemporary question.
Through these multiple explorations, each work becomes a half-open door. A reinvented scene, a forgotten ceremony, a dream buried under the stones, or simply a sensation born from silence.
And this silence, precisely dense, porous, almost sacred, becomes in turn a material for creation. It connects, it calls, it illuminates.
"Imaginary Ruins" weaves a delicate dialogue between past and present, between what was and what could be. Here, memory is not just evoked, it is activated, reimagined, and put back into circulation. History, too, offers itself to other readings, to other forms of sensitivity.
What we discover, then, is an art that does not rebuild but reveals. An art that does not seek to explain but to feel. An art that, faced with ruins, does not heal the wounds of time but transforms them into new visions. A space slowly opens, fully, where we thought only stones remained.
