A remarkable range of aesthetic and historical intertextuality is at play in the work of a new generation of Maghrebi artists. Referencing key works by the likes of Kateb Yacine or Ahmed Bouanani, they bear witness to a continuum of colonial and post-colonial violence as well as a continuum of popular and artistic forms of resistance. I will focus on the work of Nidhal Chamekh, who took part in the Tunisian revolution as a 25-year-old. Citizen and artist at once, he would occasionally step out of protests in order to sketch a character or a situation. Later, these sketches would become a part of composite drawings in which present experience is put in relation with art-historical motifs, scientific or anatomical etchings, and poem or song excerpts. The result is a series of 12 drawings, titled What Do Martyrs Dream of? (2012). In each of these, the represented elements seem to float in the space of the page. Beside the elements as such, what the drawings seek is the right space between them, one that allows derelict, wordless fragments to become visible to each other, to testify to each other’s existence. In this and other works, by experimenting with formal strategies that introduce discontinuity and latency within the space of representation, what Chamekh evinces is a complex temporality, akin to the “present in ruins” of Kateb’s Nedjma. The temporal palimpsest is laid out spatially on the page. The present of the drawing is thick with ghostly temporalities occurring on the same plane. Chamekh gave the title mn?m? to his most recent solo exhibition, playing on the phonic slippage between “memory” in Greek and “dream” in Arabic (?????). In Chamekh’s art, Memory is History shaped by the labor of dreaming. His drawings are rebuses that represent the visual unconscious of Tunisian modernity, with its dreamt revolutions and repressed revenants. Representation here must be understood in the theatrical sense. The page is a theater of the collective unconscious, a stage on which dream-work is performed.