FJORD AND //DESERT// BODIESLEAKING AND //CONTAINED// BODIES

My fascination with Norway begun early on, before I ever visited the country. Admittedly, it had little to do with the country itself, and its focus was exclusively cartographic. I spent hours musing over the map with a concentration frissoning through my very body and mak-ing my skin tingle. The reason? To my eyes, Norway looked like a human arm that was being slowly, painfully but pleasurably gnawed by the incoming fjords. Its coast emerges like a moth-eaten lace, with its play of blue and yellow that defies the usual clean-cut depiction of cartographic boundaries. I would then compare Norway’s coast to the line that separates Algeria from Mauritania and Mali, a straight, brutal, metallic line cutting the desert in two arbitrary sides. There, my feeling would be one of cleanliness and purity but also incomprehen-sion, suspicion even at how straight it was. And I would return to the intricacy of the coast. I was 6 years old.