- 1 Author’s translation of filmed explanation by Glissant 2013 in the online repertory of his concepts (...)
1Oppression, social injustice, ecological destruction and health issues reflect the ongoing coloniality of old and resurgent empires. In response to this coloniality, some alliances—including networks of artists, curators, writers, cartoonists, and film-makers—promote a planetary solidarity in which people are not mutually opposed within a hierarchy of nations, but are instead connected like islands in an archipelago. In his essay Our Sea of Islands, Tongan-Fijian writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa explained that “There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands’. The first emphasizes dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from the centers of power. Focusing in this way stresses the smallness and remoteness of the islands. The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships” (Hau’ofa, 1994: 152–153). Before colonisation by Western empires, the many islands and archipelagos of the Pacific were connected by a long history, an Indigenous way of life involving constant navigation, for trade or exploration. Today, this Oceanic connectedness continues through translocal workers, various diasporas, and climate refugees chased away by the rise of the Pacific waters. “Just as the sea is an open and ever flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming” (Hau’ofa, 2008). This non-dominant perception of differences and diasporas resonates with what Édouard Glissant (2020 [1997]), in Treatise on the Whole-World, called archipelagic thinking: a model of connected islands and histories of creolisation “with” the world, as opposed to systemic continental dominant thinking “in” the chaos-world: “the imaginary of my place is related to the reality of all places of the world […] the archipelago is the scheme of belonging and at the same time of the relation” (Glissant, 2013).1
2The archipelagic cosmos is shared by most Oceanic people, in the Pacific, the Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean. In his cosmopoetic writing and cosmographic curatorial work in France, Afropean philosopher Dénètem Touam Bona adapts Epili Hau’ofa’s concept of a sea of islands, and Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking. Touam Bona also sees a form of archipelagic thinking in the way desert people experiment with their relation to space and the cosmos, such as the Tuareg people in the Sahara or Aboriginal people in central Australia. Glissant had planned to write a book with his friend Félix Guattari prior to the latter’s death. He saw a resonance between his archipelagic theory of the poetics of relation (Glissant, 1997) and the concept of rhizome, which Deleuze and Guattari (1976, 1987) developed together. Rhizome is a plant image, such as of yam or mangrove roots growing horizontally underground like an endless mesh, a model of creative multiple becomings, as distinct from the tree as the model of vertical dominant power. The sea/desert resonance with both the archipelago and the rhizome suits my approach to anthropology well. Rhizome is a common experience for people who collect wild yams in Australia and grow them on the Pacific islands. This is no longer a metaphor in this case, but a conceptualisation of a sustainable practice.
3In art, re-worlding calls for a planetary decolonial conscience, established through a transversal solidarity—between all levels of society—that values Indigenous and popular systems of knowledge. I have previously termed it a trans-planetary solidarity: instead of searching for other planets, the objective is to care for this planet Earth by creating alliances beyond the usual boundaries of nations, classes, races, or species. This trans-planetarity opens the pluriversal realm, where multiple worlds are embedded in our Earth’s physical matter and prehuman life history (Escobar, 2018). It reconnects native cosmologies with astrophysics, as demonstrated well in La condition planétaire, the latest book by French philosopher Frédéric Neyrat (2025). As astronomers and various Indigenous peoples say, the matter of our planet, including our bodies, is related to other planets or celestial bodies. The trans-planetary exploratory process can be stimulated by artistic work—through the ecological awareness of artists and local collectives, as they engage in a creative rediscovery of the energies, memories and healing properties of ancient spiritual places. In the countryside and in cities, pre-Christian healing springs, trees or rocks have been forgotten or covered by new structures, sometimes churches. But with appropriate care, some places—and all forms of life—can stimulate the emergence of submersed spiritual relations between the inhabitants of the human and more-than-human world (Abram, 1997).
4The first section of this paper shows the transformative power of law and art as tools for the recognition of Indigenous Australian cosmological geography, as part of an ongoing process of re-worlding Australia as a nation in relation to its First Peoples. I focus on the work of two of my Warlpiri teachers from Lajamanu, ritual custodian and artist Nakakut Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, and philosopher Wanta Steve Patrick Jampijinpa, creator of the Milpirri festival. The second section shows how the work of artists inheriting the memories of other colonial histories can also resonate with archipelagic creative weaving. I chose the cartographic work of two Indigenous artists, from Tahiti and the Sahara. The work of Hawad, a Tuareg artist and poet, was shown at two group exhibitions in France: La Sagesse des lianes, “The Wisdom of Lianas” (Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de Vassivière, 2021)2 and Éloge de la submersion, “In Praise of Submersion” (La Compagnie, Marseille, 2024–2025).3 The work of French Polynesian Rangitea Bourgeois was presented in Marseille at La Compagnie art centre, and in Hawaii at the 2024 Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture. The two French exhibitions were conceived and curated by the Afropean philosopher Dénètem Touam Bona, who defines his curatorial practice as an archipelagic cosmographic process showing the subversive and creative resistance of looking at life from down under the sea, from the forest, and from the memories hidden in all places. Lastly, I will describe the outcome of a journey by a Kogi delegation (four men and a woman healer from the Columbian mountains), invited by the Swiss-French non-profit Tchendukua4 to travel the Rhone River from its source at a Swiss glacier to its Mediterranean delta. This shared trans-cultural experience with the Kogi and some scientists they met along the Rhone and in Corsica will lead to some remarks in conclusion on struggles to defend water and rural space in France. It will encourage the reader to consider another way of recognising Indigenous and local knowledge of the land, as possible inspirations for re-worlding our everyday cosmos, wherever we live.
5I started my anthropological research with the Warlpiri people in 1979 just after they had won their first land claim in the Tanami desert (in 1978). It was the first time that Australian law recognised the principles of Indigenous cosmology. In contrast to the conventional anthropological view of Aboriginal Australian totemism as static classificatory systems, it was striking to see the dynamism, creativity and complexity of the Warlpiri mapping of their land and waters, and their cosmological connections with their neighbours and distant linguistic groups. The continent is crisscrossed by a network of sung itineraries, songlines that refer to stories of what they call the Dreamings, depicting travelling totemic ancestors who connect places that are identified as their sacred traces. This cartography of ancestral songlines appeared to me to be rhizomatic and in a state of becoming, through rituals, the birth of humans and other-than-humans, dreamt songs to be sung and designs to be painted. When I met Guattari in 1982, he approved of the parallel I had drawn to the rhizomic dynamic, which informed work on dreams at the heart of collective transformative practices (Glowczewski, 2020). With the advent of hypermedia in the 1990s, and the development of Aboriginal desert art on canvas, I proposed a further point of resonance by showing that the Warlpiri cosmogeography has the same logic as internet hypermedia (Glowczewski, 2016). Thanks to digital technology, Western thinking only recently rediscovered, in network connections and entanglements, the horizontality that has been the universal experience of dreams and of many cosmologies, especially in Australia. Recognising this ancient cognitive resonance as a mental technology of care instead of an enslavement to artificial intelligence is one way of re-worlding our perception of the planet’s history.
6In 1979, the many small groups of the Warlpiri people spread out to reoccupy the Tanami desert from which they had been forcibly removed in the 1940s and 1950s, after which they lived a sedentary life on reserve settlements like Lajamanu. Through the 1980s, I witnessed the creative enthusiasm of Warlpiri families as they invented new ways of caring for the land and collectively managing places, resources and various services. They travelled by car, truck or tractor to hunt, camp, conduct rituals and establish small outposts on what they called their respective “countries”: territories identified by specific waterholes and rock formations. Over the two years when the Walpiri were providing evidence in court, they explained how through Aboriginal Law, each man and woman acquires his or her spiritual links to a series of places connected by ancestral stories about totemic beings who gave shape to the landscape. For instance, the tears of the Yam people became a spring; the blood of the Kangaroo ancestors turned into red ochre; the Water people created creeks; digging-sticks rose from the ground, making water soakages; and the digging-stick women danced as they travelled, stimulating the growth of Acacia trees, yakajirri desert raisins, and jintiparnta edible fungus. These prehuman beings are said to have lived and slept in waters and geographical features they shaped through the imprints of their travels. As eternal ancestral agents of geological features, they are called Jukurrpa, a Warlpiri word (shared by other desert Australian groups) that literally translates as “Dreamings.” Because they are non-human ancestors of humans, animals, plants, water, and all living forms of existence, the Warlpiri, like other Aboriginal groups, relate to them as an extended family in a complex kinship system. Dreamers can meet their hybrid eternal ancestors while travelling in dreams, and receive from them songs to sing or designs to paint, always related to specific places.
7Led by Warlpiri elders, magistrates were taken by lawyers and anthropologists to see places and relevant rituals as evidence. It was by proving their responsibility as ritual custodians of places through stories, songs, dances and paintings (restricted to each gender) that the Warlpiri won back their land. Their victory inspired other Aboriginal land claims. The courts had to take into consideration that thousands of Australian places are sacred, being imbued with the eternal presence of more-than-human ancestors who are sometimes also reflected in various celestial bodies that have an impact on seasonal life. When Western laws recognised these cultural statements in the late 1970s, this paved the way for the potential re-worlding of both Australian law and Aboriginal everyday life. It allowed land to be returned for collective use in many regions of Australia, but it also created a large number of conflicts and representation problems. There was a re-worlding clash in the management of these collective lands and the legitimisation of new modes of existence within the framework of Australian policies.
8In the heart of the Tanami desert, which is the Warlpiri people’s ancestral country, the boulders of Yarturluyarturlu (the Granites) resulted from petrification of the Possum ancestors after a major battle, while nearby, the Black Plum ancestors were turning into a black flood that transformed the land. The boulders surround a large swampy waterhole, and the area is crisscrossed by the songlines of other Jukurrpa Dreaming ancestors, such as the Snake, Wallaby, and Seed people. In 1984, this granitic site was threatened by a gold-mining company. The Warlpiri women and men who serve as the custodians to the place made a video manifesto to explain that the Granites should not be destroyed, even if white people do not understand why. It is maralypi (very secret and sacred) says Warlpiri film-maker Paddy Patrick Jangala, in his voiceover (ill. 1). Thanks to this video, the site was granted protection, and is still protected today.
ill. 1 – Paddy Patrick Jangala films Warlpiri women as they walk for the video manifesto at the Granites, in the Tanami desert. Central Australia
See an extract of this video in B. Glowczewski’s archival film, Lajamanu, 2018: https://vimeo.com/289440509#t=33m56s
Photo: Barbara Glowczewski, 1984
- 5 “Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, a ritual custodian from the Tanami desert.” SGMDO (Study Group on Music (...)
One of the region’s main custodians, Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, taught other women to sing the songs that protect it, and asked me to record this women-only performance that took place in a hidden rock shelter, so it could be used as the film soundtrack.5 Later she created a painting depicting her Possum/Back Plum songline crossing the Wallaby/Acacia Seeds songline (ill. 2). The circle to the left (the West) is the Yarturluyarturlu (Granites) site. The horizontal lines in the middle going East are the travels of Nakamarra’s Black Plum and Possum ancestors, outlined by their footprints in the shape of an E; the middle circle is Rirrinjarra, the artist’s spirit-place, a waterhole that came into being after the Plum black flood (ill. 2). The vertical lines correspond to the south-to-north travels of the Wallaby people, outlined by their traces in the form of footprints; they are brothers of the Acacia Seed women who can be seen (as half circles) sitting around fires at the top-right of the painting (ill. 2).
ill. 2 – Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, Janganpa/Yawakyi, Wampana/Nugrlu Jukurrpa (Dreamings of Possum/Black Plum and Wallaby/Acacia Seeds), Granites area
Acrylic painting, 168 × 126, 1989
Photo: Courtesy of Geraldine Le Roux
- 6 Seed Dreaming, video (20’) by Barbara Glowczewski and Laurence Vale with sand story teller Barbara (...)
- 7 See also the catalogue of the Exhibition of the first twelve Papunya painters: Aux sources de la pe (...)
9This painting (ill. 2) travelled around France as part of the group exhibition Yapa: Aboriginal Painters from Lajamanu and Balgo, which I curated (Glowczewski, 1991). It was later exhibited at other events (Le Roux and Strivay, 2007). The acrylic painting convention used at that time by most Warlpiri artists was based on traditional sand story drawing, as can be seen performed by Barbara Nakamarra Gibson in the film Ngurlu Jukurrpa – Seed Dreaming.6 It was only after twelve Warlpiri men from Lajamanu came to paint a huge ground painting on sand at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1983 (Glowczewski, 2016) that Lajamanu elders—both men and women—joined the desert art movement. It started on the Papunya settlement in the 1970s, when elders were distressed by how difficult it was for them to transmit their knowledge, having to live on a settlement where they could not sustain their traditional semi-nomadic way of life. Adult educator Geoff Bardon encouraged some Pintupi men to paint their songlines on school doors, on cardboard, and finally on canvas for sale (Myers, 2002).7 Thousands of paintings have since been produced by artists in the Northern Territory, in South Australia, and in Western Australia, and sold to collectors and museum all over the world. Most of this contemporary Aboriginal desert art represent aerial maps where circles refer to places, and lines show ancestral pathways and the songlines connecting them, but the designs, colours and textures have multiplied into very different creative styles.
- 8 Both quotes translated by the author.
10The success of the colourful, vibrant and creative desert acrylic art movement has helped Aboriginal land claims and boosted the international contemporary art market's recognition of their cosmology: it has been a way of re-worlding Western art ethnocentrism and its global economy. Since the 1990s, Aboriginal artists have provided at least 40% of Australian national art market revenue despite Indigenous peoples making up less than 4% of the population. Many Indigenous communities have won claims of their traditional land, but even though Native title holders gain a right of veto on mining, and many sites are registered as cultural heritage, it is much more difficult nowadays to protect such places. Across the continent, many sites have already been destroyed by mining. One of the issues is that the consent of only one or two families (who may be interested in mining royalties) is enough to overrule the collective voices of traditional custodians that try to oppose the destruction of their regions. Aboriginal people experience as many worlds as there are Dreaming pathways, that is, non-human ancestral life forms that gave birth to humans and to some animals, plants, and mineral expressions of life. This Indigenous system of collective cosmological relation with their territory (what Aboriginal people call their “country”), as grounded in dream space-time, is an ecological lesson for re-worlding our relation to land. It resonates with Guattari’s ecosophy, which binds together three ecologies: environmental, social and mental: “We cannot hope to rebuild a humanly inhabitable land without reinventing economic and productive aims, urban layouts, social, cultural, artistic and mental practices.” (Guattari, 1992: 96). And he adds that to counter the empty nomadism of modern times, it is necessary to create conditions for the emergence “of an existential nomadism as intense as that of pre-Columbian Native Americans or of the Aboriginal people of Australia” (ibid.: 97).8
11When working as a Warlpiri teacher at the Lajamanu school, Wanta Jampijinpa conceived a vision of how to re-world Warlpiri heritage, using new media to respond to the suicidal despair of children and teenagers who feel lost between worlds. He summarised his healing vision in a diagram that resonates with Guattari’s (1995) ecosophy and chaosmosis cartographies. In 2008 he posted a video online titled Ngurrakurlu “Belonging to Home”, in which he draws on the sand, explaining that Warlpiri Law is based on five interconnected pillars: Ngurlu “Home” is at the centre, while the other four pillars are Language, Kinship, Ritual, and Kuruwarri, that is to say the stories, images and places that depict Dreaming actions. If you cut the links between any of these pillars, the culture collapses, that is to say the society and its country.9 Since 2005, Wanta has also been collaborating with the Tracks Dance Company, with which he created the biannual Milpirri festival with separate ritual dances by women and men and shows created during workshops with schoolchildren, in which they practice hip hop and write poems inspired by their spiritual connections to the land.10 Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu recently contributed his vision to a collective article entitled “Interweaving Fibres: Relational Dynamics in Indigenous Australian Thought and Performance”, in which he discusses it with ethnomusicologist Samuel Curkpatrick: “It’s not you trying to do the weaving, this country is trying to weave you – to make you adapt, make you fit in. So, you become your ngurra (home). Already inside, all this kuruwarri (law) flows within. You have to be the whole ecosystem of Jukurrpa.” (Wanta in Curkpatrick et al. 2023: 649). It should be noted that the Australian university system has awarded academic titles and honorary diplomas to Wanta Jampijinpa and other prominent elder men and women who transmit Indigenous systems of knowledge.
- 11 Translated by Adrian Navigante for a one week workshop he hosted at the Alain Daniélou Foundation i (...)
12“Kuruwarri”, as expressed in narratives, paintings and geographical tracks, is translated by Wanta and other Warlpiri as “law”, and has been translated as “life-forces” by many anthropologists. I prefer to call them “image-forces”. As tracks, Kuruwarri are the only evidence that an event happened or an action took place (Glowczewski, [2004] 2016). In that sense, traces (or tracks, footprints, etc.) are true and indexes of Warlpiri Law: “…each human being partakes of the same image-forces, not with the totality of animals and plants, rain or stars, but only with certain types of animals, certain types of wind, certain stars, etc. Each one of us, men and women, is a dynamic constellation of image-forces shared with some non-humans. The shared instance of matter and image-forces matches the differentiated relations that each human being entertains with particular places. These relations rest on a very complex geo-spiritual topology […] Each Dreaming is at the same time a chanted wave and a bundle of particles, the image-forces constituting the matter and singular texture of each human being.” (Glowczewski, 2021: 35–37).11
- 12 Translated by Adrian Navigante. The author draws and compares Guattari’s and Wanta’s diagrams in th (...)
13Many Warlpiri elders understand ritual activity as a process of transforming and nurturing land and all life forms. Kuruwarri image-forces are summoned from kanunju (the below, hidden, underground) to spread kankarlu (on the surface, manifest, in public), nourishing the fertility of the relevant Dreaming, balancing rain and underground sources, regulating wind speed, etc. But a ritual also needs to end with the image-forces returning underground. The idea is not to extract the image-forces endlessly. In a way it is a counter-cumulative process, an anti-accumulation of energies and resources, to allow them to regenerate underground for next time. In that sense I have translated kanunju, the below, as “the virtual” and kankarlu, the manifest, as “the actual”: the ritual process involves repeated but different performances of actualisation and virtualisation of all image-forces. Here again, the Indigenous conceptual polarity resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) philosophy of virtual/actual transformations, as more specifically theorised by Guattari (1995). In Chaosmosis, he proposes a matrix of four polarities (virtual, actual, possible and real) to analyse the process of actualisation and virtualisation of interconnected environmental, social and mental ecologies. He mentions “the role of dreams in Aboriginal mythic cartographies as an example of incorporeal constellations or universes of values that produce on the one hand a refrain [ritournelle, the way birds sing to identify their territory], a dimension related to the virtual and the possible, and on the other hand existential territories defined as chaosmic incarnation, simultaneously virtual and real” (Glowczewski, 2021: 38–40).12 This approach resonates with how Warlpiri philosopher Wanta Jampijinpa defines Warlpiri existence: “You have to be the whole ecosystem of Jukurrpa” (Wanta in Curkpatrick et al., 2023: 649).
- 13 See Polish-French artist Angela Markul, who photographed and filmed those coastal imprints: https:/ (...)
- 14 The relationship between the sky and the earth is explained by Wanta in B. Glowczewski’s film Lajam (...)
14For many different language groups—from the north-west coast of Australia on the Indian Ocean, to the south-east of the continent—Giant Emu, which the Warlpiri call Garnananja or Marala, is the spiritual ancestor of the Emu Dreaming’s ritual custodians. The Emu Dreaming songlines are related to dispute-settling rituals. Emu is also an ally of the jalgangurru healers of the Djugun people, traditional owners of the Broome region. On the coast there, the footprints of the Giant Emu have been identified by specialists as traces of the feathered dinosaurs who walked the land when the soil was soft before being flooded (Glowczewski, [2004] 2016; Glowczewski and Gibson Nakamarra, 2024).13 According to most Indigenous Australians, after leaving its “image-force” in many places in Australia, including a rock engraving in the south-east, Giant Emu went up in the sky, and can be seen in the middle of the Milky Way in the form of the Coalsack nebula in the middle of the galaxy, a dark patch without stars. It is thanks to the Milky Way that seeds grow on the earth and rain comes in seasons.14
15In 2023, the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac hosted the touring exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, first presented in Canberra and curated by Aboriginal artists, mostly women from the Western Desert, along with painters and a weaver. Many Western Desert tribes tell the story of the Seven Sisters travelling across the land, fleeing a vicious man (sometimes represented as a lizard), leaving behind marks in the form of springs, rocks or salt pans. Guardianship of these places is distributed among different language groups, who consider these tracks alive and imbued with power. The trajectories of the prehuman ancestors outline a flexible cosmos that has assumed certain shapes and features, but continues to be transformed through the agency of their spirits, which are said to dream current life. Like other ancestral entities, the Seven Sisters produce moving archipelagos where sacred places are like islands—singular worlds connected through invisible pathways. The stories can differ, but throughout Australia, the Seven Sisters are also seen in the sky, where they became the Pleiades stars. In this sense, neither the desert nor the islands are empty, nor are the stars dead. The Indigenous Australian cosmos sees life everywhere: in the sky and on earth in deserts, stones, forests, rivers and seas.
16When famous Australian artist Brook Andrew—who identifies as both Indigenous and Celtic—was nominated artistic director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020), he chose to invite artists from various countries, most of them exploring their Indigenous heritage or colonial memories.15 His Biennale publication NIRIN NGAAY offered a journey through the various languages of the artists, some of them Indigenous, including Warlpiri. It was an archipelagic exhibition offering many indoor and outdoor places to navigate a pluriversal world (Andrew, 2020). Unfortunately, because of the Covid lockdown, each place could only be visited briefly in small groups, and most performances could only be watched online, filmed either at the Biennale or in the artists’ own countries. The 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022) reflected the realities of climate change, but the 24th Biennale (2024) explored both ecological and cultural issues, with a strong focus on Indigenous cosmologies. It was called Ten Thousand Suns to “convey the joy of cultural multiplicities affirmed, First Nations understandings of the cosmos brought to the fore, and carnivals as forms of resistance rallying against colonial oppression and dehumanisation”.16 That same year, the 60th Venice Biennale similarly showcased Indigenous and southern hemisphere artists, as did the Paris exhibition Reclaim the Earth, curated by Daria de Beauvais (2022, 2024) at the Palais de Tokyo. It presented the work of several Indigenous Australian artists, including a zombie film by the remarkable Aboriginal film collective Karrabing, cofounded by anthropologist Elisabeth Povinelli.17
17In 2021, Afropean philosopher Dénétem Touam Bona, who worked in Mayotte, French Guiana and Reunion Island, curated an exhibition called La Sagesse des lianes (The Wisdom of Lianas)18 at the International Centre of Art and Landscape in Vassivière (Central France). Through works of art, the exhibition demonstrated his conceptualisation of Lyanaj (binding with lianas, vines), a creole word used as a political tool in French-Caribbean socio-economical struggles, in reference to the Maroon resistance against slavery (Touam Bona, 2022). Most of the twenty artists invited to express their singular world were members of the African diaspora from former French colonies like Haiti, or from the current overseas territories of French Guyana, Martinique, and Réunion. There was also an impressive contribution by Carole Chausset, who works with the local inhabitants of the region where the exhibition took place on the Monts du Limousin (Plateau de Millevaches). For the local carnival, she created costumes made of birch bark to be worn by performers she called Les Ecorcés, “The Barked Ones”, as opposed to the French écorchés, “skinned ones”. At the exhibition opening, the Barked Ones were on stilts and looked like tree trunks, moving very slowly in the wooded area of the park, effectively disrupting the boundary between trees and humans, suggesting “forest spirits who awaken consciousness to the contemplation of the living”.19
- 20 Author’s translation of the French flyer for the exhibition.
18At the entrance of the main building of the International Centre of Art and Landscape on Île de Vassivière is a big tower—the lighthouse. In 2021, a huge flag-like triangle-shaped banner painted by Hawad was hung on its roof. The Nigerien-French artist explained: “In my language, in Tuareg, tewelwelt is a banner made of cloth or parchment on which a message is written; it is attached to a tree or at a height so it floats in the wind. Welwelwel, the noise of the wind that propagates the call to everything that is lost, that has disappeared or is to come, multiplication of the echoes that link the near and far, and nullifies the time and space separating worlds. My tewelwelt is the sail-wing, the rowboat of our breaths, which summons the rallying winds.”20 The banner is covered with signs that the poet calls furigraphies: “Our deserts are populated by these markers indicating nomadic paths and attachments to the land”, he says in an interview published in French and English in the magazine The Funambulist, which included images of several of his paintings. The interviewer (his daughter—the film-maker, curator, and philosophy PhD student Maïa Tellit Hawad) explains Hawad’s artistic gesture as: “a means to put a lost, wounded desert back into motion, by inventing and resignifying another desert in the infinite space and time of imagination”. He adds: “I’m looking for the kind of walking that doesn’t stop and that continues in spite of my confiscated territory; this is what I’ve called ‘surnomadism,’ as if to join the wind, which only exists in movement” (Hawad, 2023: 53). “Surnomadism” could generate a new word with its re-worlding, just as “surrealism” did.
19Three years later, Dénètem Touam Bona curated a new group exhibition, Éloge de la submersion (Praise of Submersion)21 at La Compagnie in Marseille, where Hawad’s banner was horizontally stretched by ropes like a sail, also evoking the roof of a tent in the desert. On a large wall in another room, Hawad painted another example of his furigraphies (ill. 3), with the poem Carbon Blue hanging on a column in French, and Tuareg ancient writing in Tamazight language (ill. 4).22
ill. 3 – Hawad reading his poem, Bleu carbone (Carbon Blue), also the name of the furigraphic frescoe, behind him, which Hawad painted on a wall at La Compagnie. Marseille
Photo: Frédérique Lagny, 2024
ill. 4 – Bleu carbone (Carbon Blue), poem in Tamazight and French by Hawad, extracted from his book Fiel de cuivre, published by La rumeur libre, 2024
Photo: Barbara Glowczewski, 2024
CARBON BLUE
- 23 French “emmiragement” is Hawad’s neologism to express the act of miraging, in a “multiple, multival (...)
Lightning turbulence
lightning swell
storms tempest
emotional disorder flares up
I have gone beyond
poems fireflies
Hey you who doubt
my moods
after having dipped
the accusing finger
in the blood of poetry
here is the flaming arm
that I plunged into an ocean of furnace
at the source of infinity
Through the dregs of nothingness
and the substance of emptiness
I emerge
naked irradiated screaming
– Oh perpetual miragement23
drunkenness bottomless vision
indigo spirit
here we are here we are Hallaj
to cross
swamps and volcanoes
did I really steal
your trance on the gallows
of Baghdad
or am I just
floundering
in the resonances
of hell?
I do not go to Dubai
nor to New York
- 24 Translated by Milari Barker.
Tomorrow on the peaks
I will be the panting carbon blue
the breath of the horizons24
HAWAD
20At the exhibition Éloge de la submersion, the interweaving of different artists’ work was achieved very successfully by the curator. Hawad’s banner of furigraphies was hanging facing the floor of the room, as if watching the map of the Pacific Ocean that was spread out beneath it, six and a half metres wide. This was created by young French Polynesian woman, Rangitea Bourgeois Tihopu, who called her map in Tahitian Te Ao Oteania (The Oceanian Continent) (ill. 5).
ill. 5 – The Oceanian Continent, by Rangitea Bourgeois Tihopu, 2016
331 × 200 cm. Musée de Tahiti et des îles, French Polynesia. Reprinted on photographic paper, blue back, 430 × 650 cm for Éloge de la submersion, curated by Dénétem Touam Bona, with and at La Compagnie, Marseille, 2024
- 25 A vibrant art school in Tahiti promoting creativity and traditional techniques in all mediums, offe (...)
- 26 The map “L’archipel de Palestine orientale” was drawn by Julien Boussac for L’Atlas. Un monde à l’e (...)
On this map, Western cartographic codes are reversed, with north towards the bottom; the continents (Australia, America and Asia) are blue like oceans, while the Pacific Ocean and its hundreds of islands are in shades of green, yellow and brown. As the artist explains in a short video, the aim of this inversion is to allow the islands to be viewed as not “lost in the middle of the Ocean, but rather as a territory that unites all lands and peoples”. The video was displayed on the mezzanine of La Compagnie, as part of Rangitea Bourgeois’s work for Éloge de la submersion. In it, she begins by explaining that she created the map in 2016 while studying at the Centre des Métiers d’Art de la Polynésie française in Tahiti.25 Her inspiration came from a map published in 2009 that she saw online, called “The Palestinian Archipelago” showing the myriad of places in Western Palestine where Palestinians were living, like islands floating on an empty blue sea corresponding to the lands taken from them, which they are separated from by checkpoints.26 The Tahitian artist also decided to subvert the codes of cartography to change our perception of her country’s islands, which were separated by colonisation. She wanted to divert Western viewers, giving them a different perception of the Pacific Ocean: the point of view of the Pacific Islands and their history.
21At the 13th Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture in Hawaii (2024), a smaller version of Rangitea Bourgeois Tihopu’s map hung on the wall, and she contextualised her work specifically for anglophone Americans and visitors from other English-speaking countries:
“Unlike the importance of maritime spaces, small islands are practically not visible on the scale of this map. This shows all the territorial waters of the Pacific Ocean. So what about international waters, which ultimately appear as international lands? Land that belongs to all? The question arises as to why they have decreed international waters and, conversely, lands that were obligatorily owned by a nation.
- 27 Stone platforms and pyramids used as temples, spiritual and ritual places in Polynesian religion.
- 28 Document provided by the artist.
For the inhabitants of the Pacific Ocean, maritime space was practiced, traversed, lived as the terrestrial space. Thus, migratory flows took place from Asia, gradually moving eastwards. That the Polynesian navigation following the stars developed. Among the Polynesians, the sea was considered the supreme ‘marae’.27 Would not the international waters then have to be Polynesian?”28
22For Dénétem Touam Bona, the eight artists and performers he chose for Éloge de la submersion (2024–2025) in Marseille all carry their own archipelagic cosmology: “This archipelagic research-creation project, ‘Cosmopoetics of Refuge’, unfolds through a series of stopovers, each constituting a ‘cosmogram’: space-times aiming to propose other versions of ‘reality’—sub-versions—through a rehabilitation of the power of dreams, poetry, and utopia-in-action, all in ‘correspondence’ with the most contemporary scientific research (marine biology, anthropology, geography, etc).”29 The work of Rangitea Bourgeois Tipohu is a cosmogram of the Pacific Ocean as experienced by the artist’s people, French Polynesians and other Pacific islanders. Her map is an invitation to re-world our perception of the globe, especially of the French colonisation of French Polynesia’s hundred and eighteen islands distributed across five archipelagos, which were once all connected through precolonial exchanges. Polynesians suffered a violent blow to their civilisation, accelerated by French nuclear testing on Moruroa, and by American testing in the Marshall Islands. Touam Bona explains that “in the face of the ongoing ‘cosmocide’, Éloge de la submersion proposes to go on the offensive, to respond to the offence through a creative conjuration: incantations, hieroglyphic lines, gestures that strive to exorcise evil spirits—those of capital and fascisms—while celebrating life”.30 This exhibition is a fantastic lesson in the shared quest and creative strength of the French Overseas Territories, some of whose artists are better known internationally than in France.31
- 32 Larbi Benchiha, Greetings from Moruroa, 2016, 52’, and Sand Storm: The Sahara of the Nuclear Tests, (...)
23Edouard Glissant’s called for the “insurrection of the imaginary”: “Archipelagic thinking suits the pace of our worlds. It has their ambiguity, their fragility, their drifting. It accepts the practice of the detour, which is not the same as fleeing or giving up. It recognizes the range of the imaginations of the Trace, which it ratifies.” (Glissant, 2020: 18). We saw the importance of the trace for Indigenous Australians, the Kuruwarri “image-forces” of the ancestors that the Warlpiri and their neighbours map in their paintings and land claims. Similarly, Tuareg French-Nigerien artist Hawad’s “Furigraphies” express a memory of traces in words, images and performance, including those of the nuclear testing in the Sahara. The lighthouse of the International Centre of Art and Landscape on Île de Vassivière was dedicated to that subject in 2021: on the ground was a model of ruins of villages made of clay, and projected on the huge round wall was a looping film of Hawad being interviewed and reading a long poem condemning the impact of the nuclear explosions. The documentaries of Algerian film-maker Larbi Benchiha show the toxic legacy of France’s nuclear testing both in the Algerian Sahara (16 explosions, 1960–1966) and in French Polynesia (193 explosions, 1966–1996).32 Both territories are seeking reparations.
- 33 Presentation of Forensic Architecture by member Nabil Ahmed and Olga Lucko, discussion, Gaîté Lyriq (...)
- 34 2009–2012, installation, Prome Encuentro Bienal Arte Contemporaneo di Caribe, Aruba, Caribbean, 201 (...)
24The environmental and social justice process sometimes relies on evidence produced by film-makers or artists, such as Forensic Architecture’s mapping action T5.4-P20: “Nuclear Pacific: An International Public Inquiry on French Nuclear Testing in French Polynesia.”33 Another example of a strong mobilisation is the reparation claim concerning pollution of French Caribbean soil, and the negative health effects of chlordecone pesticide used in banana plantations (Ferdinand, 2021). French Caribbean artist Jean-François Boclé from Martinique has addressed the issue in his pioneering installation of 300 kilos of bananas, called Tears of Bananaman.34 For both artists and anthropologists, the challenge to stimulate the imagination has become urgent today, so as to contribute to changing the economic logic of domination controlled by a few lobbies, threatening the health of the planet and the majority of its population. Social sciences were created with the aim of understanding the world, but also to criticise its injustices and suggest ways of changing. As for art, beyond its ability to transpose the world by creating aesthetic emotion, empathy, and sublimation, its social criticism and imaginative explorations can create ripple effects across all cultures, stimulating feelings and visions.
25In October 2023, a delegation of Kogi visionary healers from Columbia was invited to France to engage in dialog with scientists and conduct a “cross-diagnosis of the territorial health of the Rhône River”. The initiative was spearheaded by a Kogi elder and the French founder of Tchendukua, a non-profit organisation that buys land for the Kogi to protect their forests from destruction by mining and agro-industry.35 Three shamans—mama José Pinto Dingula, mama Luciano Moscote, and saga Carmen Nuvita, (also trained as a nurse; aged 38, she was a mother of ten, and a grandmother)—travelled to Geneva along with young Luis Alimaco and Kogi governor Arregocès Conchacala Zarabata, who was their spokesperson in Spanish. They had asked to see the source of the Rhône River, and travelled from there to the delta in Marseille, making stops in Geneva, Lyon, Grenoble and Marseille.36 Along the way, they met some forty scientists, a variety of experts, public servants, farmers, and various members of civil society.37 Along with a team of ten researchers, I was invited to meet the delegation near an old uranium mine at Roffin, Auvergne, a volcanic region of central France. After closing in the 1950s, the mine became a laboratory of bio-regeneration. On the first site they visited, the Kogi reacted to the radioactivity and pollution with a certain discomfort and sadness. At the old thermal spring Les Graviers, the Kogi recognised the strong sulfuric smell and its bubbles as “the lung of the territory”, which needed protection from pesticides, tree cutting and unsuitable agricultural practices: “if the water can’t breathe, it’s like blocking our nostrils: the land will suffocate and the volcanoes will erupt again,” said Kogi governor Arregocés Conchacal (ill. 6).
ill. 6 – Kogi delegation at Les Graviers thermal spring, Auvergne, France, Oct. 2023
Photo: Barbara Glowczewski
26The Kogi guests were hosted by the Corsica’s Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs (DRAC), which wanted to hear their thoughts on the megaliths (ill. 7) in the light of those in their own territory, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.
ill. 7 – Kogi delegation at a megalithic site, Corsica, Oct. 2023
Photo: Barbara Glowczewski
The five Kogi expressed great joy at the sight of the megaliths and other stone arrangements on the Plateau de Cauria.38 They were very touched to finally meet “indigenous people”, referring to the Corsicans who were taking care of what the Kogi had identified as an energetically strong site inhabited by sacred forces. They said they felt “at home”, and sensed invisible connections with the mountain and the waters. To them, these megalithic sites were the heart of a much broader territory extending beyond the island. Their observation could resonate with a pre-Celtic network materialised by hundreds of megaliths in Corsica and across different parts of Europe. They invited us to participate in a typical Kogi ritual that consisted in appealing for the health of the country and its life by mentally depositing our wishes into a small bundle of local plants they had made and presented to each of us who formed a circle: French and Spanish archaeologists, as well as Corsicans involved with the sites. The usual cotton was replaced by a puffball mushroom. One of the mamu collected our wish bundles and hid them together in a secret place near the megalithic site. Later in a rock shelter, the Kogi identified a strong presence of deceased ancestors in two sections: one for men, one for women. We sat there with the archaeologists, as well as Céline Léandri who had organised the event, her husband Frank Léandri, then director of the DRAC, his son Livio who works for the park, Corsican ethnologist Gjhasippina Giannesini who specialises in sentient and dream expressions of immaterial and material heritage, and her son Ghjacumu Giannesini, who works on cultural surveys. The crew of Éric Julien (2022), the initiator of the Tchendukua cross-diagnosis, was asked not to film, to protect the Corsican site. After a long discussion, we were all asked to stand up and perform a ritual in which we threw our worries into a squashed spider nest that the Kogi had found in the shelter. It was presented to us by Carmen, the saga healer. According to Kogi tradition, the natural matter imbued with our thoughts was put in a secret place, the cave shelter. Following their meeting with the Kogi delegation, some young art students (from Sartène and Brussels) were inspired to draw beautifully strong, sensitive maps, and further exchanges are planned.39
27Many of the scientists were deeply moved by the Indigenous process during this territorial health cross-diagnosis, and some public servants and experts in Geneva and France were touched and inspired by how the Kogi expressed their diagnosis of the Rhône River,40 specifically their sensitive perception of threats to the planet owing to the global interconnections between mountains, glaciers and rivers, and the impact of urban or industrial activities blocking water flows and polluting the soils. Several scientists suggested adapting or radically changing some of their own practices, protocols and policies. That type of recognition of Indigenous knowledge and modes of existence—where all practices, including visions and ritual performances, are connected in an art of life—might bode well for a new type of re-worlding, where artists could contribute to a respectful cohabitation of radical alterities.
- 41 I chose to keep “milieus” in English instead of “environment” as it refers to nature not seen as “a (...)
- 42 In French “indigenisation”, translates “autochtonisation”, literally “belonging to Chtonos”, the Ea (...)
28Drawing from the work of Arturo Escobar (2018), Giuliana Borea (2024) shows the ambiguity of some decolonial narratives promoted by “global art”, where diversity is diluted in an Indigenous paradigm that is too often decontextualised from its political collective agency. In Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze I stated that “radical alterity is not about exotism and exclusion but about imagination in terms of how to weave different worlds in respect of their singularities always in becoming, how to recreate outsideness in our minds. This is what I call indigenising anthropology” (Glowczewski, 2020: 77). In Réveiller les esprits de la terre (Awakening Spirits of the land) I added that “The indigenisation of the world, I call for, rests on a profound awareness of the need for trans-planetary alliances between Indigenous peoples fighting for their land and specific rights, and groups of inhabitants compelled to defend their territories against the power of the state or big industrial projects threatening their respective milieus41 and worlds” (Glowczewski, 2021: 173–174).42 To demonstrate this indigenisation process, I included in this book a chapter entitled “Becoming-Hedgerow”, presenting a history of the struggle of Notre-Dame-des-Landes in Western France, where a rural occupation took place, lasting over a decade and leading to the cancellation of an airport project that would have destroyed farmland, a forest, and the biodiversity of traditional hedgerows the occupants had restored. This so-called ZAD occupation (Zone to Defend) has managed to design a new collective world over a period of fifteen years. I have participated in a few events there since 2016, and like many others, I was impressed to see how, despite repeated violent destruction by the police, the inhabitants had created an archipelago of homes, from stone farms to self-built shelters, which established new, lasting relations with the land and its biodiversity. The occupation included various forms of artivism (activism through art) that—in the spirit of US ecofeminist Starhawk who visited the site—were turned into rituals by some inhabitant founders of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Frémeaux and Jordan, 2011, 2021). Today across France, there are a multiplicity of places where residents are creating new actions to oppose the destruction of forests, water sources or rural fields. Along with other groups, the movement Soulèvement de la terre (Rising of the Earth), which was born during the 2020 Covid lockdown, has developed a campaign of actions to condemn very dangerous water management by the French companies that are multiplying mega-basin digging projects. These are pools spanning several hectares each, dug in fields to store water, drawing on underground reserves for industrial agriculture, and thus accelerating the droughts already affecting many regions of France. The numerous actions taken to stop these projects throughout France now form archipelagos of hundreds of places where the creative input of different happenings and performances participate in re-worlding the care of land.
- 43 Special thanks to Dénètem Touam Bona and the Compagnie for the illustrations of the exhibition, to (...)
29Archipelagos “require a loving reassembly that signifies beyond the dehumanizing centripetal forces of globalization” suggested Derek Walcott (1992), as quoted by Rob Shields (in his review of Contemporary Archipelagic thinking). He concludes: “An archipelago worth recalling is Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago which had as its definitive quality its spatial interpenetration of everyday life. While it is a literary device on the one hand, the Gulag system had the effect of cutting up Soviet society into an extended archipelago. Such terms are not metaphors but signal counter-spatialisations that include practices and imaginaries that unsettle and recast dominant spatial and temporal logics, entire topologies of globalization.” (Shields, 2020). As an anthropologist, I too advocate for opening our everyday lives to multiple archipelagic cosmos inherited, rediscovered, recreated, actualised and virtualised in a constant flow of hospitability wherever we live. This includes all experiences of cross-diagnosis involving Indigenous and scientific knowledge, creolisation of sciences, and traditional wisdom and visionary techniques, as well as entanglements of Indigenous territorialities (Dussart and Poirier, 2017) with ecological struggles. Local alliances of inhabitants seem necessary for international campaigns to establish legal frameworks and reparations that would recognise the more-than-human rights of nature—rivers, mountains, forests and animals—without isolating them as wilderness (Ferdinand, 2022). The challenge for anthropologists is to analyse and shed light on these epistemological, social and political trends, which artists promote in writing and performance. But while artists and curators may stimulate these trends, it is the creativity of people in their territorial struggles that generates the tools for re-worlding our lives.43
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