Consequently,
Book better understand what desert:
“Ask people the image that the desert evokes. However, most will tell you: a dune and a caravan of camels that passes away,” smiles Marie Gautheron. Furthermore, And it is the same image that attracted this Burgundian to the Sahara when she was 20 years old – in 1970.
“I found myself in Algeria because I was doing literacy. Similarly, And I wanted to go to the desert. Nevertheless, with everyone’s images in mind, postcards, The little prince from Saint-Exupéry: a dune, a star, and the void… ”
A very populated vacuum – Book better understand what desert
But she wanted to go beyond the cliché. Furthermore, And over the trips. Nevertheless, she understood that nothing is less empty or more populated than the desert – see the tribulations in the Iznogoud desert, the character created by Goscinny!
But the desert. precisely because it seems empty, is the ideal receptacle of all book better understand what desert our fantasies – and that’s what tells in Desert, deserts The art historian, former teacher at ENS Lyon. The way in which we have. over the centuries, created our images of the desert, without worrying too much about the reality of the life of its inhabitants.
Populations et cultures multiples
In France, the desert is of course Sahara. “France has this crazy dream. which it will realize, to make a colony of stands join, Northern Algeria, the fertile lands of Mitidja, and its sub -Saharan possessions, the former AOF (French West Africa, from Senegal to Togo),” explains Marie Gautheron.
The bloody conquest of the Sahara. what is called “pacification”, builds the French imagination of the desert: we always repel the enemy, but the more we advance, the more we realize that the desert is not just a sea of sand in motion, but a multifaceted space with multiple populations, multiple cultures. And in book better understand what desert the center, a world of mountains populated by Tuareg, which we will load mysteries. »»
Our devastated future
The image of the Touareg, a mutical warrior, remains. With others, more current. Like that of a space of test. spirituality, a form of return to the sources of Christianity – it is the figure of the father of Foucauld, a social officer withdrawn into the arid immensity of Assekrem, in the south of Algeria.
The image also of our future devastated by the climate crisis: the drought in the Sahel had killed 200. 000 people between 1968 and 1986, and today 500 million people live in spaces that desert …
“The desert. insists Marie Gautheron, is who remains after the cataclysm, something that has been abandoned, it is the space of dereliction. A form of absolute that always fascinates us.
Desert, deserts. From Middle Ages to XXIe centuryby Marie Gautheron (Gallimard).
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