lā turāb is a floor-based intervention presented by Fatiha Zemmouri, composed of an earthen inscription rendered in Arabic Diwani calligraphy*. The installation brings into relation two fragments of a sentence — min turāb (“from the soil”) and ilā turāb (“to the soil”) — whose lines intersect and overlap within the space.

Created in situ, the work unfolds as an invitation to silence, offering a meditative accompaniment to a circular movement. Beginning in a dense area of soil, the script is heavily layered and becomes partially illegible. As one moves through the space, this density gradually decreases: the signs begin to emerge, and the phrase ilā turāb becomes increasingly legible, structuring the progression toward a central point.

Here, writing departs from the sign to become matter and sediment. Language turns into soil, drawn back to the ground by a form of gravity. Reading is experienced through walking and through the body, across variations in density. The work opens onto a sensory experience of return to the earth, without religious assignment, connected to burial, silent memory, and transmission through gesture.

The soil, used as the sole material, retains its texture and fragility. Part of it comes from the Tahanaout region, and another part from Dans les bras de la terre by Salima Naji, exhibited last year in the atrium of MACAAL. Conceived as a welcoming “house,” that work symbolized Mother Earth as the common origin of all human beings. Ilā turāb thus takes shape as a gesture of homage, extending a material drawn from a previous work into another context, through a different form of writing.