Boutheina Gharbi is the co-founder and manager of Animed (Tunisia), a cultural company that specializes in the enhancement of heritage and cultural mediation.
She has a Masters degree in Research on Recent Architectural Heritage (IXXth-XXth) and acquired in 2019 her Doctoral degree on “The Enhancement of Ancient Heritage” with an emphasis on archaeological sites.
During her early career, Gharbi designed a wine cultural itinerary that lies from modern cellars to Tunisian archaeological sites attesting to wine-growing activity since antiquity. Thanks to a grant from the European Union, this project was carried out under the leadership of UTICA and benefited from the "Iter Vitis" label, the Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe.
By 2015, she started designing and implementing this itinerary in order to provide the archaeological sites of Kerkouane (W H) and the Roman Villas site in Carthage (W H) with a number of facilities. This project was oriented towards the realization of a themed circuit to improve the experience of visitors through didactic, directional devices and landscaping.
In 2017, she co-founded Animed, a cultural company dedicated for the management of this Route and the design of other cultural projects whose innovation lies in the capitalization on the richness of Tunisian heritage, the invention of mediation and experimentation with models for the management of heritage assets.
Within Animed, Gharbi designed a wide array of cultural and natural circuits’ projects highlighting Tunisian archaeological and natural sites on behalf of a group of national institutions for the improvement and creation of new and innovative tourism-related segments and niches.
In 2019, Boutheina executed additional projects that range from the restoration of traditional houses to the intervention on archaeological sites and historic centers.
She was the Program Developer of Museum Lab, a Tunisian scientific association specialized in supervising the co-design of five innovative mediation devices for the benefit of Tunisian heritage goods, namely the archaeological site of Kerkouane, the Sousse archaeological museum, the Tunis currency museum, the archaeological site of Dougga and the historic center of Kef.
The success of Museum Lab led to the launching of “Hkeya fi Hkeya” project in 2020 which aims at enhancing the territory of Kef through cultural itineraries; more precisely through the inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
In January of the same year, Boutheina launched through Animed a Cultural Tourism Hub project called "Medina Living Lab" to improve the Medina of Tunis. This project has been previously included on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979; specifically, the northern suburb of Bab Souika - Halfaouine.
In November 2020, Gharbi launched ‘Blassa,’ an additional project to promote and improve the visibility of the Tunisian archaeological sites and historic centers by focusing on the economically disadvantaged regions in Tunisia. With the various cultural features it enjoys, ‘Blassa’ constituted a major socio-economic lever for these areas.
In addition to her passion and extensive experience in cultural heritage, Boutheina is an architect-designer where she followed a remarkable series of training in the field.
