exhibition by rym hayouni: what comes after the ashes – the first ten

by rym hayouni

Since the 1970s, more than 500 million tonnes of wet phosphogypsum have been released into the sea of Gabès.

Phosphogypsum is what remains when phosphate is turned into fertiliser: heavy metals, rare earth elements, radioactive material.

The rest is piled on land, into large open-air gypstacks exposed to wind erosion, flooding and leakage into groundwater.

More than 8,000 hectares of the gulf are contaminated.

The plants of the Groupe Chimique draw their water from the aquifer beneath the oasis of Gabès.

Facing the stacks, the sea is let into shallow pans and left to dry until it gives up its salt.

The coast is pumped, dried, dumped into.

What’s extracted leaves by sea towards Europe. Its waste stays and accumulates.

people say that back in 2026, there was another oasis. it followed the water down. its people were displaced. the phosphogypsum closed over it.

it is buried, whole.

a woman went to find it.

she climbed the first gypstack and waited for the southern wind.

the wind overturned the sand,

the sand shook the dust,

the dust flew up to the sky.

her film photographs were found,

ten have reached us.

For our final exhibition in our current space, we’re beyond joy to welcome Rym Hayouni, presenting “What comes after the ashes: the first ten”. Looking back from a future where the oasis is already gone, the exhibition presents ten photographs from a fictional character’s search for it among Sfax and Gabès’s toxic gypstacks in Southern Tunisia.

Rym Hayouni creates experiences across visual, narrative, and sensorial forms. Her practice is rooted in film studies and training in physical theatre, where performance art became its core. A Master’s in Scenography then opened her work to space and installation. Rym mostly works in situ: each work begins when she encounters a material or a landscape. She collects traces: photographs, field recordings, found objects. These evolve into a spatial narrative that brings together the marvellous and the factual.

Her current research turns to mythologies to read the ecological disasters caused by mining and extractive industries in southern Tunisia.