“I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey”
Mahmoud Darwish
In the quest to explore the boundaries of land—those shaped by war, colonization,
militarization, and migration—this exhibition calls for a reconsideration of what it means to
inhabit spaces that have been mapped, claimed, and scarred, yet never fully contained. What
does it mean to walk on land, to trace its tactility, its undercurrents, and the histories it
accumulates? In the act of treading, is there an attempt to reclaim or redefine the very
territory that history has sought to conquer? Through videographic reflections, these works
capture the blurred and shifting contours of certain territories, offering a reconsideration of
how we experience and represent the lands we occupy. The map, in this context, is not an
absolute authority but rather a tool of interpretation, a stimulus for reflection. If image-
making serves as a way to confront precarious histories, then memory, too, becomes a
method of negotiating these contested landscapes, while the mapping of spaces in the videos
activates the respective territories.
As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, “I have lived on the land
long before swords turned man into prey,” reminding us that the land precedes all else, that
it bears witness to forces that seek to dominate it, and yet, it endures. It is with this perspective
that we approach territory here as the central protagonist. The landscape is its pivot,
assuming form in relation to time, memory and subjectivity. Territory holds within it silent
narrations—zones of passage, of crossings, and dislocations. As the philosopher and poet
Édouard Glissant observed, “our landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be
traced on the underside. It is all history”.1 Through the language of moving image, the artists
trace landscapes not as static settings, but as dynamic protagonists: terrains shaped by time,
conflict, and survival. The land becomes both witness and actor: it is at once deeply personal
and irreducibly historical.
In this sense, the exhibition orchestrates moments of interaction between the
territories captured by different artists, who intimately and collectively map their interior
geographies in an effort to reclaim and destabilize these spaces, moving them beyond
imaginary constructions. It brings together heterogeneous visions in a site of engagement,
without necessarily blending or indexing them. Rather, it is an invitation to dwell in the
ambiguity of place—where the landscape is fragmented, layered, and ever alive.
Each landscape holds within it a complex collection of images—personal and
collective stories shaped by the resilience of those who inhabit it. Yet, these lands are not
passive backdrops but are active agents in the narratives of their people. By guiding our
perception through multiple lenses, they offer more than documentation. They are
interventions that breach time between the act of remembering and reinhabiting. They
collect a choreography of displacement and return. They call on us not simply to look and
observe, but to listen, to feel, and to remember otherwise. Embedded within each film, the
landscape becomes a medium for personal or collective recounts, broadcasting a dialogue
between the interiority (subjective experience) and the exteriority (physical or historical land) of
space. In doing so, the land ultimately speaks for itself, and we are asked to step back, to step
in, alternately, to traverse this projected choreography; to seek contact with these
surrounding locations while allowing ourselves to be transposed into the emitted images, to
1 Édouard Glissant, and J Michael Dash. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays . University Press of Virginia, 1999, p. 11.be affected by these chronicles, and to virtually and viscerally tread places that are both here
and there.
Racha Khemiri
July. Tunis 2025.Zineb Sedira
Les terres de mon père/ The Land of my Father (2016)
Country: Algeria
Is it legitimate to want to define the limits of a territory, or does this amount to removing them
from the only domain where they can become fulfilled: the interiority of the one who expresses
them, in this case her father? And if this is the case, how, in a respectful way, to map the notion
of territory? Every effort of spatialisation is, for her father, at once mental and physical. Walking,
her father traces out his land both mentally and physically. Experience plays a fundamental role
in the tracing of a territory. Zineb Sedira plays with this divide between ‘interiority’—the mental
apprehension of the world—and ‘physicality’—the physical materialisation of a territory. Is not
the notion of territory inseparable from the experience of the body? The two heterogeneous
notions of body and territory seem here, in the experience of her father, consubstantial with the
representation of land. A perception of territory at once precise and hazy emanates from such a
standpoint.
Kamal Aljafari
UNDR (2024)
Runtime: 15’
Country: Palestine
Helicopter footage examines the desert, surveying ancient natural formations and human
interventions. Dynamite changes the face of the land. Farmers work their fields. Children play
hide-and-seek. Employing archival footage, UNDR constructs an eerie narrative of calculated
incursion. We cannot help but recall that Palestine remains a land subjected to aerial
surveillance that seeks to appropriate the landscape.
Azzedine Saleck
Dune (2022)
Country: Mauritania
Runtime: 8’
“Above the land
Across the sand
The things I’ve seen
The ways I’ve been”
A conversation between Bah ould Saleck and Mohamedou ould Salahi, respectively the artist’s
father and a former Mauritanian detainee who spent 12 years in Guantanamo in the hands of
the CIA.
A dialogue between two Mauritanians about the time against the backdrop of images of a loads
of sand in the desert, suggests that possibly and despite human efforts the landscape escapes us
and cannot be conquered.
Saif Fradj, Esraa Elfeky
I’ve Known Rivers (2023)
Country: Tunisia
Runtime: 18’
“South of Ajdabya”, founded by Esraa Elfeky from Egypt and Saif Fradj from Tunisia, is a 2022
made collective of filmmakers interested in the north African desert, its mythologies, geologies,
and anthropology. Using a mix of old filmmaking techniques (analog) with digital drawings and
contemporary audio-visual effects, the collective aims to rewrite a common lost memory of the
North African region on which the subjective imagination interacts.
