For centuries Tunisia was the leading producer of Mediterranean commercial sponge, which was one of the country’s most important export goods. When, in 1911, Albert Samama Chikli travelled to Libya to film the Italian-Turkish war from behind the Ottoman front, he shot on his way footage for several films that he later sold to Gaumont. In Zarzis, a peninsula south of Djerba in the Gulf of Gabès he documented the traditional sponge industry, from the diving to the sales negotiations on the market. Sponges! Where have you gone? You were the divinities of our childhood bathrooms, you were in every house. We were washed with sponges and played endlessly with them, marvelling at their marvellous capacity to hold so much water and to release it when pressed. (Christians might also remember a certain merciful sponge playing a role in the crucifixion.) Needless to say that the marine ecosystem of the Gulf of Gabès, for times immemorial one of the richest fishing aeras of the Mediterranean, is now dead, devastated by the emmissions of the Gabès-Gannouch factory (phosphate), the untreated discharges of the Gabès Chemical industry (fluorid, heavy metals) and so on (oil leaks).

Mariann Lewinsky