Tewa Barnosa: Listening to the Echoes of the Silenced

Based between Tripoli and Amsterdam, Libyan artist Tewa Barnosa describes her practice as an exploration of “historical and contemporary warfare tactics and theatrics in relation to ecological ecosystems, and the exploitation of people, land and resources”. Merging research and imagination, she studies the language of colonial and postcolonial power—how violence, both visible and invisible, is narrated, archived, and sometimes forgotten.

“Growing up in Libya, you’d feel the internalised state of fear as the societal norm,” she recalls. “The Gaddafi regime suppressed every possibility of artistic, cultural, and communal creation that does not fit the state narrative. When I began to dream of working and engaging with the world as an artist, it almost felt like a delusional mirage.”

That mirage, as she calls it, became a method. Her creative process grew from an urge to question and connect to “create the space to seek answers and experiment collectively”. In her installations and performances, Barnosa intertwines archival research with speculative fiction, oral poetry, and digital forms, drawing from Amazigh and Bedouin traditions while engaging the political and ecological realities of Libya and the wider region.

Her recent performance of In Yesterday’s Forecasts, which premiered at Centrale Fies in Italy, encapsulates this approach. The work reexamines the genocide in Libya under Italian colonisation through the lens of ecological disappearance, tracing how the extinction of a native plant called silphium was instrumentalised by fascist propaganda. “The work vocalises poems and visualises archival material about extinction and genocidal violence,” she explains. “It departs from the story of silphium and connects it to the colonial infrastructures that still shape our present, disguised today as migrant detention centres funded by the EU.”

For Barnosa, collaboration is key. She speaks of working with artists like Dina Jereidini and Ghenwa (Noiré) Abou Fayad, describing the process as one rooted in “care and sensitivity to the archives, poems, and legacies it held”. Such collaborations, she notes, are not only creative acts but gestures of reclamation—they reweave the connective tissue between cultures and generations fractured by war.

This ethos also shaped WaraQ, the art space Barnosa founded in Tripoli at the age of 17. “It was the first art space to open in Tripoli after the revolution,” she says. “Most of the projects focused on creating a resilient flow of conversations and collaborations during political instability and civil war.” When militias forcibly shut WaraQ down, she continued its activities from Europe, transforming it into a nomadic platform for publishing, mentorship, and dialogue. Now, she looks ahead to establishing a ‘radio space’ that can operate across Tripoli and the diaspora, a project she describes as “an experiment in fugitivity”.

“I hope my work offers a perspective on how we approach and understand symptoms of histories, memory, and myths,” says Barnosa. “In the longer term, I hope to accumulate and create pedagogies that use artistic research as tools for mutual learning.” Through her layered practice, the artist invites viewers to listen to the silenced. Her art, both rigorous and poetic, becomes a space of restoration and a quiet act of resistance against disappearance itself.