We take a walk, feeling the salty surface beneath our feet. We start in Tunis and head towards sicily. We don't see, the horizon line is blurry… we feel as if we’re melting into the atmosphere. Being on this land feels like being in a vacuum; everything is still and white. The vastness of the place is almost overwhelming, you can't tell from which direction the wind blows. We encounter villages of Drexcyians, and a lot of trash comes to light, mountains of plastic and other non-decaying matter. They melt under the sun, shaped and sculpted by the wind and heat, forming huge hills like dry coral reefs.

Chott el-Jerid - a ghost of a former sea? A skin made of a dried sea containing gypsum and halite matter, “inspired” the colonizer to flood the desert. François Roudaire proposed transforming it into an inland sea by creating a canal stretching from the Tunisian coast on the Gulf of Gabes to the salt lakes in the northern Sahara. To Roudaire, infusing the Mediterranean into the desert would create a wetter Saharan climate, turning the land into fertile ground for agriculture while fencing off rebellious southern Tunisian tribes. He was also convinced that the area of the Chotts might once have been the seabed of the mythical Bay of Triton, and he dreamed of resurrecting it. His project was intended to be realized with Ferdinand de Lessep, who also worked on the Suez Canal. This imagination was encouraged by the Messinian salinity event, a geological period during which the Mediterranean Sea underwent cycles of partial or complete drying.

We imagine this land as the Mediterranean in 2450. Its water molecules have transformed into salt crystals, erasing sharp borderlines. All those who drowned in it due to the European border genocide appear to have developed new abilities when it comes to breathing. Their skin has become resistant to salt. This connects to the myth of Drexciya, an underwater population living peacefully on the seabed of the Atlantic ocean. Their lineage traces back to the pregnant African women who were thrown off ships during the transatlantic slave trade and continued to live under water.

“Everytime you try to drown us we crystallize between the world of the living and that of the transformed as ghosts in liquids, soils and sonics.”

What would the Mediterranean say if it knew it was about to be forced to merge with the desert?

It is difficult to imagine what the mediterranean might say or ti speak of other entities, be this human, more than human or geological formations, without reproducing the hierarchical representation inherent from the colonial project. The question is, how can we speak of otherness without silencing or failing to hear? Chott el-Jerid holds many signs of pollution, mutation, and charm. By looking into the surface we can start seeing the mutation it had gone through .

When it comes to mutation, water is a great source for imagination, as it’s where a lot of transformation happens. In the depths and darkness of the sea, beyond what our eyes can see and our mind can comprehend, is actually the only place on earth that has resisted human intervention. There remains the possibility of a world beyond our grasp, a structure we cannot access. There is almost a desire that this space exists and still resists.

Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A fetus in its mother’s womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. Could victims of human greed have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?