Mame-Diarra Niang returned to Senegal in 2007 to bury her father, after years of living in France. That return is where The Citadel begins. Published by MACK in 2022, the trilogy follows discovery, loss and renewal through landscapes that are studied and imagined at once.

Its three parts are distinct movements. Sahel Gris is the ground zero of the project, a no-man’s land where infrastructural works have been abandoned to the dust, its continuous horizon holding the eye in suspension between movement and inertia. At the Wall pauses at a place of rest and interrogation, an oracle, and the gate to the citadel. Metropolis steps into the crowded urban surface, looking outward from within a city that keeps shifting in southern light.

What binds the volumes is Niang’s idea of the plasticity of territory. A private inquiry into place becomes inseparable from her own metamorphosis; landscape is treated as material for producing many selves. As the sequence proceeds, city names and geographic coordinates lose their authority, becoming as irrelevant as the visions that history, and the present, impose on the same ground.

The edition is built to carry that argument. Three volumes sit together in a printed slipcase, and their bindings differ deliberately: an accordion fold, two paperbacks bound into a hardcover, a Japanese fold. Each movement is given its own pace and its own way of unfolding; form here is not packaging but part of the editing.

A collector should approach The Citadel as one sequence rather than a survey of separate bodies of work. Read in order and kept together, the three books operate as a sustained proposition about territory, return and selfhood, and their structure is what makes that proposition legible.