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AZDINE SEDJAL

Collect the elements of the land,
baraka, the spiritual essence of a place,
or have them collected by others,
from places that I have never been.

Above all collect small elements,
those things inadvertently picked up from a stroll through nature,
a stone in the shoe, a blade of grass in our hair,
placed side by side... juxtaposed to create new images.

This demarche allows me to see the landscape differently
and makes me consider
a new problematique of art in nature.

I sculpted water – ice – as it can take any form
and then return to it's source.

I placed blocks of ice in the desert
and, through these lenses of ice,
I considered the land,
almost as if I were looking into it's eyes.
It was vast!
And with the melting of the ice,
I became much smaller,
in the face of this grandeur.

"Look at our eyes, they are so small yet they see great things",
said Jalaladine Rumi.
It was this thought that occurred to me,
to my spirit, as I watched.
This is one of the sources for my landscapes,
landscapes the size of our eyes.

This land is both large and small,
we cannot escape it,
it follows us like our shadow...
daytime shadows in the landscape are fragments of night.
As our dusk falls,
dawn begins on the other side of the earth.

After arriving at distant horizons and having seen much,
it is to our own interior landscape
to which our vision returns.
And it is here where we reside, finally.
It remains just to express our sentiments
with a few words,
in a short phrase that does not pass beyond
the space between two eyes.
As Nifari said in the 7th Century,

"The larger the vision, the shorter the word".