During my research on the aesthetics of revolt in Tunisia, I was confronted with a double absence in the improvised ways I made sense of the ways subjectivities were formed, as the authoritarian spectacle was turned against itself by the people who wanted “the fall of the regime!” … But what did I want? Not properly speaking Tunisian Darija or Arabic, generated an important gap and distance between my interlocutors and me, but also between my field of research in general and me. Mediated by the French language, the knowledge I built was necessarily partial. Along the way, I convinced myself it was the very language barrier that compelled me to delineate my subject and to look into the aesthetic, (in)visible and more embodied movements of revolt, analytically opposing the concept of aesthetics to that of culture. Maybe admitting the difficulties to learn the local language properly, would have been more generative? I propose to look back at my own process of becoming a passionate researcher in times of planetary revolt, somewhere in between Brussels and Tunis. Moved by a dialogue with visual artist Bouchra Khalili, I will reconsider the figuration of the storyteller as hlayqi·a. I will ground the stories I tell in the poetics and relational forms of study and (un)schooling we are presently enabling in the Kitchen, a collective space always in the making in Brussels. By telling stories against ethnography, or even refusing the category of (auto)ethnography altogether in favor of storytelling, I will try to share the feeling of impossibility of doing research otherwise, all the while finding my own ABC, my own words, language, and poetics to speak or tell stories nearby, staying close to the trouble of my own lived experiences. The urgency of the present moment compels us to slow down and improvise different methods, to envision and enact exit plans that can prefigure a world to come, a more loving and caring world, a world where many different worlds fit.

Joachim Ben Yakoub is a writer, researcher and lecturer operating on the border of different art schools and institutions in between Tunis, Tunisia, and Brussels, Belgium. He is affiliated to the MENARG and S:PAM research group of Ghent University, where he is conducting research on the aesthetics of revolt somewhere in between Tunisia and Belgium. He is guest professor at LUCA school of Arts Brussels and lecturer at Sint-Lucas School of Arts Antwerp, where he is also promotor of the collective action research The Archives of the Tout-Monde. As part of ‘The Kitchen’, a safe house in the center of the capital, he is currently experimenting with different rhythms of hosting and sharing fugitive aesthetic praxes.