“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 migratio —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 gather 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 score; to seek contact with these surrounding locations while allowing ourselves to be transposed into the emitted images, to be affected by these chronicles, and to virtually and viscerally tread places that are both here and there.
Racha Khemiri
July. Tunis 2025
