Launched by Nawaat in July 2021, Innawaation is a media incubation programme designed to expand Nawaat’s multimedia platform by engaging creative practitioners working across art, journalism, and technology.
Between 2021 and 2025, eight calls for submissions were organised through the programme, resulting in the selection and support of 19 projects led by artists, multimedia technicians, developers, web architects, designers, and journalists.
Through residencies, collaborations, and public events, Innawaation provides selected participants with a production budget and tailored support to develop projects and media content in close collaboration with Nawaat’s permanent team. Participants also benefit from Nawaat’s technical infrastructure, logistical support, and human resources throughout the incubation process.
OBJECTIVES
Strengthen the links between art, journalism, new technologies and social and citizen engagement.
Establish a tradition that involves artists, journalists and techies in a participative and immersive approach.
Rethink quality journalism and introduce creative tools through arts and technologies.
Bring artists to take part in citizen and media action.
Promote access to artistic and cultural content.
Selected Projetcs
Mariem Labidi
Mariem Labidi is a Tunisian-Argentine singer, composer, and sound designer. A committed, multilingual artist, she sets poetry to music in several languages. As the first Arab artist invited to the Argentine Parliament by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, she has released several albums and developed international projects.
multimedia installation
Rifiyaat, a multimedia installation by Mariem Labidi, pays tribute to the oral and musical heritage of women who work the land and sea. Through soundscapes, portraits, and evocative staging, the work amplifies the voices of agricultural labourers, fisherwomen, and other workers whose songs at family celebrations are often their only source of income.
Moving from eastern mountains to western coasts, and from rural fields to island shores, the installation weaves a polyphonic narrative that preserves a fragile and threatened memory. It transforms the pain and invisibility of these women into a source of strength, building a bridge between local traditions and global questions of labour, gender, and cultural heritage.
Wissal Labidi
Wissal Labidi is a versatile Tunisian artist. She trained in graphic design at the School of Arts and Crafts in Tunis, then at the Tunisian National Theatre’s School of Acting. In 2013, she also took part in the international Truth and Dare programme in Tunis and Copenhagen.
She has created several shadow-theatre productions with the Lab’Z’orchestra collective and performed in Tunisian theatre productions, including Fenêtre sur… by Raja Ben Ammar and Bis by Sonia Zarg Ayouna. Her work also encompasses writing and translation for both theatre and poetry.
theatrical performance
Wissal Labidi’s La Malédiction I is a raw, hybrid theatrical performance that confronts violence against women through a layered dialogue between art, testimony and collective memory. Drawing on an excerpt from Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory, reworked into Tunisian Arabic, it combines literary adaptation with accounts gathered from women who have endured physical, psychological and sexual violence. The result is an uncompromising piece that makes room for experiences too often silenced, dismissed or reduced to passing news items.
Performed at Nawaat’s fifth festival as one of the projects selected by the Innawaation incubator, the work refuses euphemism and the comfort of distance. Labidi’s performance brings the audience into direct contact with the social mechanisms that normalise violence: victim-blaming, disbelief, denial and the persistent questioning of women’s words.
Through a stripped-back staging and intensely physical presence, the piece explores bodies marked by trauma but also sustained by resistance, survival and the difficult process of naming what has happened.
Rather than presenting feminist struggle as a simple opposition between women and men, La Malédiction I calls for recognition, responsibility and justice. Developed in dialogue with psychologist Sandra Dachraoui, it treats speech itself as a path toward liberation: listening to survivors, believing them and acknowledging violence are essential first steps. At the centre of the festival, the performance articulates a language of revolt that is intimate as well as political, affirming the dignity and force of women who continue to stand despite violence and silence.
RamiS & Rym
Ramis Barka is a Tunisia-based visual artist specialising in storyboarding and animation. Trained in 3D animation at ISAMM, he recently expanded his expertise through a storyboard course with StoryboardArt, taught by artists working with Pixar, DreamWorks, and Marvel Studios. With more than a decade of experience, he has collaborated with Tunisian studios, agencies, and directors.
Rym Amami co-founded the animation studio Freesh Production in 2012. She also joined the organising committee of the Chouftouhonna feminist art festival, later becoming a podcast producer at Inkyfada. She is the screenwriter of the comic books Shift and the light novel Phaza 907 B. In 2024, she took part in the TQR artistic residency organised by the Mawjoudin association and performed her work The Crow’s Maze on stage.
collective investigative game
With L’bahreya, artists Ramis Barka and Rym Amami created an immersive, collective investigative game that turned the festival space into the scene of an environmental mystery. Participants were invited to trace a scientist who had come to Tunisia to measure marine pollution and then mysteriously disappeared. Videos, graffiti, hidden objects and seemingly obvious details became clues in an open-ended investigation, encouraging festival-goers to explore every corner of the venue, exchange findings and piece together the story collectively.
Behind this playful format lay a serious inquiry into the socio-economic and environmental consequences of industrial development along the Mediterranean, including the stakes around seawater desalination. As participants followed the clues, they encountered information about marine pollution in Tunisia: the shrinking of Posidonia seagrass meadows, the disappearance of fish species, and the destructive effects of unchecked industrialisation on the sea, land and air.
The project transformed complex ecological questions into a tangible and accessible experience, combining strategy, testimony, observation and puzzle-solving. Rather than treating environmental awareness as a passive lesson, L’bahreya made it an active and shared process. Its game mechanics particularly engaged younger audiences, showing how artistic and interactive formats can foster critical awareness, environmental education and a culture of resistance to pollution. By the end of the investigation, the project invited participants not only to solve a fictional disappearance, but also to recognise their own role in confronting industrial models that threaten ecosystems and communities.
Yafa Saidi
Between science and art, Yafa Saidi builds a bridge where precision and creativity meet. A chemical engineer specialising in nuclear safety applied to nuclear medicine, a violinist, and a coordinator within the DEBO collective, she works in environments where every gesture matters and precision becomes almost choreographic.
immersive chemico‑artistic performance
Équilibre Instable is an immersive chemico‑artistic performance that transforms a laboratory into a living archive of Tunisia’s contemporary political history. Combining her background as a chemical engineer, violinist, and activist, Saidi uses real chemical reactions—colors that shift, foams that erupt, columns of smoke that rise—accompanied by sound design and narrative voice‑over to embody key moments from the Ben Ali era to the post‑revolution period. Each experiment is named after a political or social concept such as repression, anger, betrayal, or patience, allowing audiences to “see” the evolution of regimes, alliances, terror, and workers’ struggles through the behavior of matter. Spectators enter the performance wearing lab coats, moving from one “station” of history to another, before being invited at the end to create their own reaction, a metaphor for collective responsibility in shaping the future. The project stands out as a flagship Innawaation work: a political, scientific, and artistic experiment that exemplifies Nawaat’s capacity to weave together journalism, memory, and inventive forms of resistance.
Oumaima Bahri
Oumaima Bahri (born in 1990 in Gabès, Tunisia) is an actress and performance artist. Trained in theatre since 2009, she has collaborated with several Tunisian theatre directors and choreographers, and has created her own performance projects, including Corps Mouvant, Fragments—presented at numerous international festivals—and Connecté(e)s.
On screen, she appeared in Nidhal Chatta’s Silentium and in the series Harga, for which her role earned her two Breakthrough Actress awards.
interactive, participatory performance
Connecté(e)s is an interactive, participatory performance in which artist Oumaima Bahri explores the concept of connection through the body. Every gesture and every gaze becomes a pulse, a transmission of energy.
Through this immersive experience, Connecté(e)s transforms the stage into a space of symbiosis, creating a unique collective experience that engages spectators in a process of co-creation. Adaptable and renewable, the performance creates strong connections between the artist and the audience, encouraging profound human and emotional exchange.
