For the M’Dina Biennale, I produce a large map of the Maltese archipelago. For this drawing I use sand that I collected on a Maltese beach. It is a detached, aerial, almost virtual vision. The territory is global, shown at a distance, like a bluish, Mediterranean vision, captured through the window of a first airplane trip to Malta, a few months earlier.

I had four stones delivered to my studio. These four stones have a particular emotional load. They were extracted from the depth of the waters. Four fragments of the Azur Window. Four small blocks, 15 x 20 cm, on my table in Paris. Four samples of the distant island. Rough, chalky, dense. I hold the country in my hand. Bumpy, punctuated with holes, paths, caves. Four landscapes, appendices to the appendix of the cape that collapsed a few months earlier and was swallowed by the waters.

I am no longer in heaven now. It is about material and materiality, soil and firm ground. I mould the painting with my hands. I untie, I lay things down, and then the layers of colours merge. Some “pictures” are very photographic; it is deliberate because I like the disorder of the illusion. A series of “drawings” about veils, hidden things, light, black and white and colour too. My tribute to it-Tieqa tad-Dwejra will be “unveiled” next March, on the anniversary date of its collapse, a work of imprints made out of stone, marked with the seal of the earth.