Manifesto for a Museology of the Desert (brief statement on nature and culture, and working notes from Meditations at the threshold)
Text made during Materia Abierta 2021, "Ni apocalipsis ni paraíso: Meditaciones en el umbral"; summer school on theory, art, and technology curated by Mônica Hoff and Eva Posas. Photographs were taken during the Al Balad Artist Residency Program 2022 (by Saudi Ministry of Culture & Hafez Projects) and during expeditions of Stultifera Navis Institutom between 2018 and 2021.
“I saw that there is no Nature.
That nature does not exist.
That there are mountains, valleys, plains,
That there are trees, flowers, herbs,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is not a whole to which that belongs,
That a real and true set of things
Is a mere ailment of our ideas.”
— Alberto Caeiro
1.
It is a statement that is not at all original and to which multiple voices in the area of science, the arts, the defense of the environment, and the rights of indigenous peoples have subscribed in recent decades. However, due to the evolution of our context, it is necessary to insist on: there is no such thing as a division between nature and culture.
The modern civilizational project has expanded throughout the different territories of the planet, imposing the notion of this division, conceptually separating human history from the ecosystems in which it occurs and imposing the reproduction of a certain mode of consumption on the rest of the subjectivities with which it shares the world. It has relegated the perspective of other animal species to “behaviors”, it has conferred on plants the status of decorative objects or biotic engineering tools, it has abrogated our own the right to destroy mountains or forests in order to produce “wealth”, and it has relegated the role of dreams to that of mere prospective reflections of the material world.
This condition concerns what we call culture. It concerns everything we value to the point of caring for it, of studying it, of exhibiting it in our best buildings and of preserving it so that it can be contemplated by future generations. It also concerns the subjects who enunciate and from where they do so.
If the union between nature and culture is decreed from the pulpit or the desk, the use of what these concepts intend to encompass is implemented: communities, ecosystems, ideas, languages. Enacting a piece of the city as a 'biocultural space project' is a promise about the future, but maintains the consideration among the “they" and the "us” (which regards non-humans as mere social devices) intact.
That conceptualization is not innocent. Whoever functionally disposes of humans and non-humans for the design of an exhibition space, carries out the same conceptual exercise as the organizers of the great colonial projects. We are able here to find that power promises to restore the non-existent split: it seeks to introduce trees, flowers, herbs, rivers, and stones, into its concept of history, and thereby subordinate them to its mandate. Tear them out of their ambiguity of trees, flowers, herbs, rivers, and stones, and impose its own mythology on them.
In such a context, a museography exercised over a forest is a totalitarian act.
2.
The critique of the binomial nature-culture would be then a questioning about the construction and reproduction of museums and analogous institutions (galleries, artistic exhibition forums, and/or critical reflection); on the ethics concerning the exercise of museography and museology as practices in the context of the socio-environmental catastrophe of our time.
An urgent call to decentralize creative energy is revealed: to displace the gaze of hegemonic urban centers that —in their voracity— seek to expropriate the symbolic power of wild ecosystems.
If the new paradigm is the functionality of carefully designed green spaces, the rebellion in cultural terms will be in the interpretation of the uncertain that already exists far from the cities, in places with difficult urban emplacements, where overcrowding doesn't exist, where life is fruitful without human intervention, where settlements do not last long.
In this sense, the desert is the insubordinate territory par excellence.
3.
We will speak of the desert as that arid and non-arable territory, which extends between cities and agricultural fields —which are not part of it—, and whose human population is scarce.
To propose a desert museology, therefore, supposes a study proposal on its history, on the communities that have traveled it, on the cataloging of what survives in it, on the imperatives for its conservation.
It supposes the opposition to any exogenous infrastructure except that one built by those who inhabit the desert, knowing the always provisional character of the residence.
It entails the recognition of the entities and symbols that dwell in the desert: the rivers that run every two decades, the cosmology of its cacti organized like a tissue of spores on a sandbank, the giants turned into hills, or the whisper of tiny animals that in their continual slip hide from the sun.
It implies admiring the transience of its art, always elusive and threatened. It implies to narrate its history: learn that sometimes when it is destroyed, the art of the desert escapes to the dreams of some people, and that in that territory —which also belongs to the desert— no power is capable of penetrating.
The museology of the desert implies investigating and recognizing the knowledge that allows surviving in it and valuing it as a refined art. Understanding in these a code that is woven in the acts of everyday life: appreciating the beauty in the limited material that is reused, in the architecture that awaits its turn to be inhabited again or that appears to be abandoned when it is a home, in the powdered clothing whose economy of color is an ethical response to the use of water.
The museology of the desert contains food processes: dishes that celebrate the meeting, a small number of ingredients that highlight the flavor of each element and the process of acquiring it, the difficulties of preserving the cold, and the ingenious variety of the uses of fire. It also includes the digestive processes, the destination of the residues, and the ethics of use that restrict the abuse of water and the spatial and temporal arrangement —in the open sky and when the sun overwhelms— of the banquets.
It involves recognizing in the history of the desert the genealogy of territorial dispossession of its original inhabitants in the conformation of what is now called nations and cities, in the name of a development that excludes previous forms of life and hides the native names given to those same sites or their meanings.
It means to understand that the denial of the seasonal use of the territory, that the establishment of property rights over it, that the transformation of its wild space into irrigation and mineral extraction areas; is the renewed form of subjugation over the traditions that have inhabited and preserved the desert, as well as over the rest of non-human communities that are dying in the name of agro-industrial development projects.
The museology of the desert invites us to understand that the processes of collective organization in it are developed through tribal and non-communitarian structures. That the agora in the desert imposes a sedentary lifestyle that is unnatural for it, and that it encourages the abuse of the surplus economies. That the deliberative liberal project imposes an extractivist logic on the desert, the result of which is observed in numerous abandoned mining towns, wastelands of depleted soil, and a projection into the future of their identical industrial areas.
The museology of the desert recognizes in it the space that resists the establishment of borders: extensions through which the passage of communities has been filtered since time immemorial. It is an invitation to show solidarity with those who travel through the circumspection of sand and the artificiality of its limits.
4
The museology of the desert is a call to exercise reading and creation tools on wild regions, without implying their physical transformation or the establishment of institutions in them.
It implies the conception of the uninhabited desert as an autonomous civilizational space, whose cultural rights reside in its preservation as a zone of transit, solidarity, and survival.
It is the assertion that the desert is high culture. That their subsistence arts require an exercise of collective appreciation that refutes the conception of 'culture' as something that is promoted by the central powers and endures as an identity associated with a specific place, or as the work of the genius by a city artist.
It is a refutation of the idea of the future, the vindication of a vulnerable and diverse coexistence, and a claim for what still survives.
*Text made during Materia Abierta 2021, "Ni apocalipsis ni paraíso: Meditaciones en el umbral"; summer school on theory, art, and technology curated by Mônica Hoff and Eva Posas. Participation in the program was thanks to the support of NORO.mx. Photographs were taken during the Al Balad Artist Residency Program 2022 (by Saudi Ministry of Culture & Hafez Projects) and during expeditions of Stultifera Navis Institutom between 2018 and 2021.
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