Exhibitions

The sculpture La Valse expresses a dialogue between earth and bronze, tradition and movement. Modelled in terracotta, it recalls the ancestral craft of firing clay, grounding the work in Mediterranean histories where material emerges directly from the earth. Its form is composed from the coastlines of twelve nations bordering the Mediterranean, tracing a cartography of connection rather than division. Each contour evokes the mutable threshold between land and sea - an interstitial zone of exchange, circulation, and encounter through which cultures have intertwined for millennia. The warm, porous texture of terracotta lends the piece an organic immediacy, while two small bronze birds rest lightly upon its surface, their metallic sheen in quiet tension with the matte body of clay. The contrast captures a moment of balance between density and air, the human hand and the natural world.

The title, La Valse (The Waltz), gestures to notions of dance and rotation - the sculpture’s sinuous movement encircling the Mediterranean in continuous motion. This rhythm echoes the enduring flow of cultural exchange and migration across its shores. Through this work, Béchir Boussandel harnesses dance as a metaphor for the shared vitality that connects communities across territories and seas.