Through his performance walks, Ridhà Dhīb, Franco-Tunisian artist, weaves a sensitive geography where Europe connects to the Maghreb and where each border becomes a lived experience. His work is not a spectacle: it is experienced in the step, in the slowness, in the insistence of a body that becomes memory and resistance. To inhabit the threshold, for him, is to tear and to sew at the same time, to bring forth what history erases and to give voice to the absent.
Indexing: Mediterranean Knowledge Library
Inhabiting the Threshold: Tracing Ridhà Dhīb
Sana Tamzini - 22-med - September 8, 2025 - Paris, Sousse, Mardin, Greek-Turkish border, Syria, Maghreb, Europe
Ridhà Dhīb, Ibn Khaldoun
#art #border #migration #walk #resistance #Mediterranean
The Franco-Tunisian artist Ridhà Dhīb explores borders through performance walks connecting Europe, the Maghreb, and the Middle East.
His projects Ex-tracés (Paris–Mardin), Conjuring the Threshold (Greek-Turkish border), and Hor-I-zons (Paris–Sousse) transform the body into memory and a living archive.
The walk is conceived as an act of resistance against forgetfulness, a sensitive writing of the invisible traces left by migrations and exiles.
By inhabiting thresholds, the artist denounces the violence of borders and the confiscation of the right to move freely.
His practice embodies a politics of slowness and makes the body an embodied knowledge, bearer of history and collective memory.
*“History, in its reality, is information about human society, as it is. It makes us aware of political events, particularly those related to distance and settlement, to sedentariness or nomadism.”
Ibn Khaldoun, Al-Muqaddim
There are artists who shift the lines; and others on which they walk. Ridhà Dhīb, however, seems to conjure them. Through his performances Conjuring the Threshold, Ex-tracés, and Hor-I-zons, a bodily grammar of crossing unfolds. Far from spectacular art, these walks engage a traversing body: a body that is no longer just that of the artist, but a body-memory, a body-border, a body that, with each step, digs into the sediments of a collective history.
For Dhīb, walking is about bringing to the surface the invisible layers of a world in crisis. It activates a form of inner seeing, not through the frontal gaze of the photographer or painter, but through the slow erosion of the ground beneath the feet.
At the moment of placing a foot on a dividing line, the artist does not cross: he inhabits the threshold. He tears it and sews it at the same time.
Ex-tracés: Walking as Palimpsest
The project Ex-tracés (Paris–Mardin) is a journey of 5,232 km, between the European heart and the edges of Syria. A geographical line, certainly, but also a historical, political, emotional line. The title itself condenses the intention: it is a work of extraction, excavation, of what has been erased yet persists.
This walk is not a simple displacement; it becomes a performed writing on an asphalt parchment. With each step, fragments of stories resurface, those of refugees, migrants, wanderers, survivors. The artist's body becomes a tracer of memories. It does not produce an archive: it is the embodied archive.
This is a palimpsest of the visible, where the past is not behind, but beneath our feet. Where the landscape seems neutral, a road, a field, a border, Dhīb reveals the violence of concealments. His feet read where our eyes forget.
It is a walk against amnesia.
The Conjured Threshold: Rite, Threshold, and Resistance
With Conjuring the Threshold, the project condenses, symbolizes, and dramatizes. At the Greek-Turkish border, the artist stages a ritual. But it is neither theater nor a reconstruction. Rather, it is a backward magical act, a conjuration in both senses of the term: both a protective rite and a call to the specters.
The threshold is no longer just a place. It becomes an entity. And this entity must be named, crossed, sometimes embraced, often rejected. In this ritual, the artist invokes the absent presences, the disappeared from the borders, the anonymous of unmarked graves.
And then, there is this almost absurd scene, recounted by the artist in a burst of laughter during our discussion, mixed with resignation. During his crossing of the border bridge between Greece and Turkey, just a hundred small meters, trivial compared to the thousands of kilometers walked, the soldiers prevented him from walking. No pedestrians here, they decreed. The body, suddenly, becomes illegitimate. It is not its slowness that disturbs, but its sovereignty. After several attempts, the guards remain inflexible: he must cross by car. So, they stop a passing vehicle, make him get in. The scene becomes burlesque, but it is the burlesque of a world where one can no longer cross a threshold on their own feet, only transported, caged in a motorized box.
This detail, far from being anecdotal, reveals the full violence of a policy of displacement without bodies. The step, this fundamental, elementary, archaic gesture, becomes subversive. Crossing on foot is no longer a right. The threshold is confiscated. It is no longer the body that moves, but a displaced, deactivated, subdued body.
The image, here corporeal, thus becomes the site of a dialectical montage. An in-between, a “neither here, nor there,” where history stretches, knots, and fissures. It is not about showing the border; it is about making it sensitive in another way. Through slowness. Through attention. Through tearing.
The performance becomes prayer, incantation, silent scream. And the threshold, a stage where the invisible, what prevents walking, what denies the right to gesture, is felt. In this theater of the real, it is the very right to exist in motion that wavers.
Hor-I-zons: From North to South, the Return to the Native Place
With Hor-I-zons (Paris–Sousse), the walk bends. It returns to the origin, to Tunisia. But this return is not a retreat: it is an opening. The word “horizon” is written here as an explosion: Hor-I-zons, the “outside” of the multiple “I,” the “sounds” that resonate beyond languages.
In this performance, the artist's body becomes a bearer of cultures. He walks from Paris to Sousse, but he primarily traverses an inner cartography made of uprootings, fragmented memories, emotional landscapes. There is, in this crossing, something of a pilgrimage without dogma. A walk that seeks not salvation, but listening.
Here again, the visible is not what is given, but what is constructed; what resists forgetfulness by constantly transforming. The body becomes an image, not fixed, but moving, stirred by a breath of history.
Politics of Slowness
It is essential to highlight the temporality of these performances. Slowness is strategic. It refuses the imposed rhythm of media urgencies, the injunctions to react. The walk, in its organic temporality, reconfigures our way of perceiving.
It is no coincidence that Ridhà Dhīb chooses to walk. There is in walking a modality of resistance that recalls ancient pilgrimages, Gandhi's marches, silent processions. To walk is to affirm that the body thinks, that movement is memory, that each step is an act.
We would undoubtedly recognize in these gestures the ethics of the gaze: that which is not satisfied with seeing, but which commits to making visible. And this visibility is never immediate: it requires time, care, fragility.
What the Body Knows
What traverses all of Ridhà Dhīb's performances is the question of the body. Not a performative body in the spectacular sense, but a sentinel body, a witness body, a body that knows. It knows because it has carried, absorbed, inscribed within it the pains and hopes of others.
Here we find a central intuition of the artist: the body is a place of knowledge, an operator of thought. This knowledge is not codified, it is not rational. It is sensation, affective memory, imprint.
In Conjuring the Threshold, when the artist places his bare feet on the earth of a border, this simple gesture opens an abyss. It does not demonstrate anything; it shows that something has taken place, and that it continues to take place. It is the epiphany of a tragic knowledge.
Fragments for a Poetics of Crossing
To conclude, but this walk does not conclude, it extends into the gaze of each one, let us say this: Ridhà Dhīb's work is not a work to observe. It is a work to inhabit. It is not looked at; it is traversed. It does not ask us to applaud, but to walk with.
It is a work that stands upright, on the edge, between art and politics, between ritual and testimony. It affirms nothing, but it brings forth.
Ridhà Dhīb does not seek to represent the exiled. He walks with them. He does not speak for, but through. He is a medium, in the strong sense of the term: one who connects, who makes visible what has been erased, audible what has been silenced.
*The quote from Ibn Khaldoun resonates deeply with the approach of Ridhà Dhīb, particularly around walking, borders, and memory embodied in movement. By emphasizing that history, according to Ibn Khaldoun, manifests through human displacements, what Ridhà Dhīb's performances literally embody.
Cover photo: This mosaic is composed of 160 photographs from the performance Ex-tracés (Paris-Mardin). Each image documents the inscription on the ground and in braille of one of the 160 passages of the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees © DR
Sana Tamzini, artist and exhibition curator. She directed the National Center for Living Art in Tunis between 2011 and 2013. She is also the president of the Fanak Fund for the mobility of artists and cultural operators.