Aya Chriki

Cartography of Belonging: Traces and Erasures, 2026

This project explores the loss of the original landscape and the reconfiguration of the sense of belonging. Through the question: “What does it mean to lose a sea?”, I examine the conditions of a new form of anchoring. Is it we who move away from it, or is it the sea that withdraws from us?

Born from a double displacement (the personal exile from Gabès (Tunisia) to France and the gradual silting of the port of Utique (Tunisia)) this work brings together two narratives of disappearance. It is the encounter between two bodies losing their bearings: the displaced human body and the transformed body of the landscape.

The research is based on printing on black paper. By intervening manually with paint before printing, I create a tension between the photographic surface and the painterly gesture.

The image becomes a space of negotiation where the gaze is guided, held back, or fragmented. Between the trace that persists and the erasure produced by matter – an erasure that always leaves glimpses, shadows of what once was – a new way of inhabiting the world emerges, at the threshold between memory and forgetting.

Series produced during the Tilal Utique AIR artistic residency (February–March 2026), organized by the Kamal Lazaar Foundation.