Ex-Tracés is a walking performance covering 5,232 km from Paris to Mardin, a city located on the Turkish-Syrian border. Between March 15 and August 26, 2022, I retraced—step by step and in reverse—the Balkan route taken by refugees on their journey towards Europe, completing the performance over 160 stages.

During this journey, I wrote 160 passages from the Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees in Braille, distributing them across 11 countries: France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, and Turkey. At each stage, I created ephemeral inscriptions of selected extracts of the Convention, adapting to the specific sites and locally available materials.

To write in Braille a convention intended to be “carved in stone” is to emphasize its fragility, as well as the vulnerability of refugees themselves. The choice of means and materials makes the text visible rather than readable: in most cases, touching it means destroying it.