Kaïs Dhifi TN
ThunderGolf
Sculptural and immersive installation
Friday, the 23rd, from 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Saturday, October 24, from 2:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Friche La Belle de Mai
Place des Horizons
Marseille
Free admission
ThunderGolf is an immersive installation set in the fictional universe of Metalia. Blending sculpture, virtual reality, and sound, it activates a real-time, audience-driven post-apocalyptic odyssey. At the heart of the installation, a Volkswagen Golf Mk2 modified for hostile terrain becomes an interactive mobile vehicle. Serving as a functional sculpture, narrative architecture, and performance space, it combines mechanical elements with immersive technologies, functioning as a threshold between practical use and fiction, physical reality and speculative projection.
In a future marked by fluid borders, climate change, and techno-cultural hybridization, the experience unfolds across three simultaneous and interdependent modes of perception. Every action taken by the driver (navigation, radio, lights, signals) alters the environment perceived by the passenger in real time. From the outside, the viewer picks up on the narrative fragments being broadcast. This synchronization of the three points of view—without any imposed hierarchy—forms the dramatic core of the work. The soundtrack takes the form of pirate radio stations from Metalia, broadcast via a built-in sound system, extending the narrative space beyond the vehicle and anchoring the installation in an autonomous soundscape.
By transforming an iconic everyday object into a performative installation, ThunderGolf brings together popular automotive culture, speculative fiction, and immersive systems to offer a poetic counter-mythology of mobility.
Cast
Art Direction: Kaïs Dhifi
Production: Guild of Metalia
Executive Producer: Seconde Nature / Zinc
XR Production: Sélim Harbi (Saraab Studio)
Artistic Assistant: Cindy Gaschereau
Sound Engineering: Terence Meunier
Music Curation: Skander Besbes
Artistic Outreach: Kenza Zouari
Mentions
A project by the CHRONIQUES CRÉATIONS Platform.
Co-author: HARBI Sélim.
Executive Producer: CHRONIQUES.
Executive Producer: Guild of Metalia.
With support from Lieux publics—National Center for Street Arts and Public Space, the Elyssa Project, the French Institute in Tunisia, and Europe Culture Moves.
Kaïs Dhifi
Straddling the line between myth and fiction, Kaïs Dhifi develops a sculptural and immersive practice rooted in the remnants of an imagined, forgotten, or yet-to-come territory. Her work combines sculpture, installation, and narrative devices to explore the transformation of perceptions within speculative environments.
Influenced by archaeology, vernacular techniques, and magical realism, he creates structures and artifacts that function as fragments of an ever-expanding narrative. These are part of Metalia, a fictional, cartographic universe where the narrative unfolds through objects, spaces, and interactions.
By transforming material into an interface, his works explore experiences situated at the intersection of Mediterranean traditions and a techno-global imagination, offering a speculative mythology of contemporary worlds in flux.
