My name is Meriem Krikab and I am a young artist from Amiens. Coming from migration, I have long wondered about my belonging to a territory and my legitimacy to define myself as such. My body embodies the origin of my Moroccan ancestors and was nurtured by Italy, a western country. Its roots, which began to develop, were cut during adolescence to establish themselves here, in France. I realized that it was no longer a question of a country, of a nationality, but rather of a territory. In the same way that photography and video frame a space and produce contours. These are never definitive, they evolve according to the observer who visualizes it. The body becomes both a unit of measurement of this limit and the limit itself. What if the body itself became a territory to explore? A cosmos to be studied on the same scale as a planet?
In this work of photography, video and installation that I have undertaken, I use the human body as a starting point to express a feeling of intrusion. Through my productions, the anonymous body is cut off from reality: it is segmented, flattened, enlarged. I create integrated and fictitious landscapes from the surface or inside the body. The skin becomes a desert expanse, the depths of the flesh are transformed into streams. Thus, the body is transformed into a progressive landscape, like an unknown territory to be explored. The skin becomes a surface occupying the entire frame, a territory unique to each person, where time and life are transcribed. The landscape frames an immensity within itself, offering a fragmented vision of a reality delimited by four lines. In my approach, these lines are not fixed, they can contract, expand, adapt, or even contradict a space. The fragmented body thus becomes universal, anonymous.
