HAMMAMET — A documentary and digital exhibition tracing six decades of the Hammamet International Festival opened on Friday evening at 9.30 p.m. at the International Cultural Centre of Hammamet, better known as Dar Sebastian. Titled "Endless Memories" — "Une mémoire vivante" in French — it runs until Sunday 2 August and forms part of the festival's 60th edition, which continues to 13 August.

The opening date was not chosen at random. It falls on the anniversary of the inauguration of the town's open-air theatre by President Habib Bourguiba on 31 July 1964.

What is on show

Ten digital panels are installed along the approach to the theatre. They are given over to the town of Hammamet itself, to the founding of the theatre, and to the history of Dar Sebastian — the villa built by the Romanian-born aesthete George Sebastian, whose gardens and architecture the festival has used as its setting since the beginning.

From there the exhibition moves through the festival's own history: the successive artistic visions that shaped it, the identity it built edition after edition, and, at the end of the sequence, the official poster of the 60th edition. A separate section is given to the audience, through photographs, videos and visual archives — a deliberate choice, since it is the public, the organisers argue, that made the festival's continuity possible.

The display also pays tribute to the directors who have run the festival over six decades, and reserves a space for the 60th anniversary of Tunisian national television, which the committee credits as an essential partner in preserving the country's audiovisual memory. Among the names attached to the site over the years are Oum Kalthoum, Winston Churchill and Ziad Rahbani.

Why an archive show matters here

Tunisian summer festivals are usually judged on their line-ups: who was booked, how many tickets sold, which international name topped the bill. The 60th edition of Hammamet, running from 11 July with 32 performances from twelve countries, is being judged on that basis too.

What the exhibition does is different, and it addresses a real gap. Six decades of programmes, posters, stage photographs, recordings and correspondence accumulate somewhere, and in Tunisia that "somewhere" has rarely been a catalogued, publicly accessible archive. Much of what survives of the country's festival history sits in the holdings of national television, in private collections, or in boxes at the venues themselves. A digital exhibition mounted for three days is not an archive; it is a demonstration that the material exists and can be shown.

The step after the exhibition

The organisers have framed "Endless Memories" around the idea that memory is not the evocation of the past but a living heritage that renews itself. Taken seriously, that framing implies a follow-on: digitised holdings that outlast the three days, a permanent catalogue, and access for researchers and the public outside festival season.

Other Mediterranean festivals of comparable age have gone that route, building online archives from their own back catalogues, often in partnership with national broadcasters. The Hammamet committee's decision to give national television a dedicated space in the show suggests it knows where the material is. Whether the partnership outlives the anniversary is the part worth watching.