Tracer un territoire

Overview

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.