The Kamel Lazaar Foundation is pleased to present the exhibition “I Hear The Old Sound of The World’s Future” by Berlin-based Tunisian artist Mohamed-Ali Ltaief at B7L9 Art Centre.

The exhibition considers the profound connections between sound, memory, and histories by revisiting early 20th-century North African sonic archives and listening to the stories they hold. Through his research, Ltaief investigates colonial-era sound recordings produced by the Prussian Phonographic Commission between 1915 and 1918. These archives contain the vocal recordings of North African prisoners held in German war camps. Today, these sound collections are stored across institutions such as the SMB museums in Berlin and Ennejma Ezzahra in Tunis and in different counter-archives. By returning to these fragmented archives and the lives behind them, the artist foregrounds overlooked histories and voices.

The exhibition engages a multi-channel video installation, giving space for sound to become spatial, visual, and performative, opening new ways of entangling with these testimonies. The opening will take place on Friday, April 24, at 6:00 PM, and the exhibition will run until July 5, 2026. “I Hear The Old Sound of The World’s Future” invites the audience to listen differently, recognizing how sound carries memory through time and continues to echo today.

B7L9 Art Centre Tunis Coproduced with Archipel — International festival of musical creation Geneva A project conceived by Mohamed Ali Ltaief Sound: Lamin Fofana

Over the last three years, together with artists, performers, thinkers, musicians and comrades, we have been reentangling the histories of sound and music recording in North Africa, Sub-Saharan countries and in the diaspora during the first decade of the twentieth century.

The ongoing research has been built step by step, sound upon sound, through intensive collaboration with those who worked closely with Mohamed Ali Ltaief. After coming to fruition in Tunisia, the project continued to grow by connecting with a range of collaborative hosts: Ennejma Ezzahra in Tunis, Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives (IMEC), and different counter-archives.

The project investigates the legacy of the North African sound archive collections recorded by European music labels and the Prussian Phonographic Commissions in Germany and North Africa during the first decade of the twentieth century. Specifically, it retraces the early phonogram sound archives that were commissioned and classified during the 1910s, and are today stored dispersed, in part at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, and in part at the Ennejma Ezzahra in Tunis (CMAM), as well as in various counter-archives. These sound archives include prompt ethnographic recordings made by the Prussian Phonographic Commission, founded by Wilhelm Doegen, with a group of philologists, linguists, and ethno-musicologists who captured the voices of colonial subjects imprisoned in war camps across Germany, producing approximately 1,650 shellac recordings made between 1915 and 1918. Some of these prisoners were Tunisians, such as Sadok Ben Rachid Haj Youssef. The Weltarchiv (Imperial World Archive) continues today to retain the vocal traces of Muslim prisoners of war.

These early recordings contain the echoes of Asian and African prisoners of war held in these camps, including their refusals, muffled laughter, and quiet refrains. Still, these shellac records are stored at the Humboldt Forum’s Lautarchiv in the German capital, constituting an archival register of African, Asian, and European languages recorded under the auspices of German imperial knowledge production. Ltaief revives fragmented biographies and foregrounds sonic expressions by shifting the sound testimonies into a spatialised, visual, and performative practice. The components of the project include a multi-channel video installation, ceramic artwork, archival display, and diagrams printed on fabric retracing the histories of phonographic recording in the Arab world and across the diaspora.