Two days before the police came for him, underground radio DJ and documentary-maker Abidi Nejib was overseeing a late-night recording session in a graffiti-emblazoned basement in downtown Tunis.
"With the dynamics since [Tunisia's uprising in] 2011, people are daring to speak out. We're an outlet for people who can't express themselves on traditional platforms," the 29-year-old said, as he watched a rapper aim digs at politicians in a makeshift studio.
Three years ago, the scene would have been unimaginable.
"I worked at a local radio station and it was basically like working for a political party," Nejib explained, referring to then-president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's iron grip on freedom of expression.
When a Tunisian street hawker set himself on fire, prompting the Arab spring, hopes ran high that civil liberties would be restored. Instead, many within the Islamist-led government have struck a jarring moral tone based on sharia law in one of the Arab world's most secular countries.
Against a background of economic problems that triggered months of protest, the moderate Islamic Ennahda party capitulated this month, and agreed to resume talks that will lead to it handing over the reins to an independent caretaker government ahead of planned elections in spring.
But the continued crackdown on a vibrant artistic community offers an insight into the tangled politics that could still derail the Arab spring's most promising transition to democracy.
Banned or exiled under Ben Ali, religious groups have resurfaced since the uprising, bringing deep divisions to the fore. Radicals have smashed art shows, while dozens of musicians and artists remain in jail or in hiding. Last month, a public prosecutor charged two sculptors for works deemed "harmful to public order". The owner of a television station was fined for broadcasting Persepolis, an animated film that depicts the author struggling to adjust to sharia during the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Suffocated by fresh repression under the new government, DJ Nejib turned to a US-based cyberactivist, who taught him and a group of Egyptians and Moroccans how to assemble a pirate radio transmitter. Radio Chaabi (Arabic for popular) operated mostly through secretive night-time recordings.
Partly a celebration of music free from the threat of hardliners, early recordings simply experimented with lacing popular traditional Arabic music and rap lyrics. Politically focused efforts included collaborations with musicians from Palestine.
"A project like this could only have been possible in a post Ben Ali world. But that doesn't mean the current administration is better. It's a weak regime which wants to control people, but can't because there's citizens' resistance on all sides," said Nejib.
The government has repeatedly denied such accusations. An Ennahda spokesperson said the party was not "responsible for any judicial decisions or actions".
Days after the Guardian interviewed him, Nejib and seven colleagues were jailed following a dawn raid.
Almost three years since a wave of popular anger toppled Ben Ali's government, the first of several corrupt, autocratic Arab governments to feel the swell, Tunisia is still treading water. Attempts to hammer out a new constitution have floundered as hard left unionists have battled Islamists, in particular over a clause that would allow sharia law to be brought in. With an eye on the coup that felled its Muslim Brotherhood allies in Egypt, Ennahda has attempted to use debate, but months of political deadlock has nevertheless ensued.
On a recent sunny Wednesday, a group of students and an enthusiastic 74-year-old grandmother handed out political flyers at kerbside cafes. Around one corner of a tree-lined boulevard, a weekly protest was taking place; on another, anarchists from a newly formed group called Désobéissance! (Disobedience!) loitered.
"I no longer believe political parties can bring about change in Tunisia," said Nabil, an anarchist who said he was beaten by Tunisia's feared police for distributing "anti-capitalist" badges at a rally.
The anarchists are a minority, but their disillusionment is widely echoed.
"Intellectually and politically the revolution sparked a jump of 15 years," said Majd Mastoura, a street poet, whose popular gatherings are monitored by plainclothes police. "The issue is this: people who support extremists are Tunisians too. They weren't imported from Gabon, or France, or outer space," he said .
Announced via Facebook, the only criteria for Mastoura's open mic street sessions is that performers use Tunisian colloquial, rather than Modern Standard Arabic or French, both of which are considered more prestigious.
It is a small but telling point. Ex-president Ben Ali used Tunisian colloquial in an official speech just once during his 23-year-presidency: the day before he fled into exile. Analysts say it was a last-ditch attempt to reach a wider, often rural, audience.
Hours away from the northern, tourist-filled coastal towns, Tunisia's impoverished desert heartlands have been home to decades of uprisings. In Sidi Bouzid, opposite the building where fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself to death, a homeless man slept under a wall scrawled in slogans. "Revolution: made in Tunisia," one said.
The single, main street has been renamed in honour of Bouazizi, but little else had changed, residents said. "His family feel they cannot even be proud he died; it was for nothing because our lives haven't changed," said Slimen Rouissi, a family friend who rushed the dying Bouazizi to hospital, gesturing at the still-charred municipal building.
Unemployment, which was the main trigger a spate of self-immolations that year, has jumped to more than 16% since 2011.
Thousands of jobless people have turned to illegal hawking on the backstreets of the capital. Past a maze of temporary stalls, an archway leads to a 200-year-old courtyard of the El Hamra theatre.
Leila Toubel, a celebrated actor and scriptwriter, wrote a revolution-inspired hit play, Monstranum's, which toured Europe countries this summer.
"The artistic challenge is how to talk about monsters that don't live in grottos, or jump out at night, but these monstrous imams who have brought the country down to its knees," she said. "You have to dig deeper to maintain the urgency after three years, but also to refrain from exoticising [religious hardliners] Salafists."
Radicals have taken over about 1,500 of the country's 5,000 mosques, using them to recruit and lobby for jihad, an official told the Guardian. In August, the government banned Ansar al-Sharia, a groups with suspected links to al-Qaida. Ennahda has also sought to rebuff accusations of complicity by opening investigations into the assassination of two secular opposition leaders by Islamic militants.
"There are scary things happening in terms of security and the economy. I don't know who dared call the uprising the jasmine revolution," said Toubel, referring to the national flower and a label favoured by the western media. "It's not over yet, and in the time of martyrs and wounded, you cannot talk about [a beautiful flower-like] jasmine."
She shook her head in disbelief, bright red earrings jangling loudly. "And anyway, jasmine smells nice, but it wilts very quickly."
