The Desert Will Expand and Carry My Footsteps...in progress
A series of events and a publication
(Editorial Statement)
Ibrahim Al-Koni invites us to resist the pre-image of the desert as desolate and a void, and open a path toward seeing the desert as everything that disguises its true nature. Reza Nagarestani proposes that the desert is another civilization rather than the solitude of civilization. Diana K. Davis reminds us that deserts are “commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development,” a perception rooted less in ecological truth and more in colonial misrepresentation.
What does it mean to negotiate the word desert, when its meanings are fragmented into multiple beings of fugitivity, resistance, hermetism, withdrawal, erasure, emergence, speculative futures, and the mythic? What urgency are we obliged to insist on such negotiations? What emerges or surfaces when we orient ourselves towards the desert from our different positions? What methodologies can perform the totality of the desert as nature and un-nature, as silence and echo, as witness and grief, as memory and map, as home and as the desert itself?
The Desert Will Expand and Carry My Footsteps is a series of talks, performances, and presentations, designed and curated by Tempodesert, followed by a publication, that invites artists, performers, curators, writers, and cultural workers, through which the performativity and the aesthetics are explored, and methodologies are proposed to engage, negotiate, and perform the multiplicity of the desert. Including but not limited to related concepts, and intersections with geopolitics, infrastructures, exploitations, indigeneity, mysticism, climate, and colonial history.
As an editorial team, and through events and a publication, we are intentionally and purposefully committed to creating a dialogical space by bringing different perspectives and positions. Alongside, we are focused but not limited to contributions that situate its context within what is known as the Great Desert Belt that stretches from North Africa to China, crossing the Arabian Peninsula, not only as a geographical backdrop but also as a site of knowledge, environmental realities, migratory histories, colonial cartographies, and speculative possibilities of futures.
Ibrahim Al-Koni invites us to resist the pre-image of the desert as desolate and a void, and open a path toward seeing the desert as everything that disguises its true nature. Reza Nagarestani proposes that the desert is another civilization rather than the solitude of civilization. Diana K. Davis reminds us that deserts are “commonly imagined as barren, defiled, worthless places, wastelands in need of development,” a perception rooted less in ecological truth and more in colonial misrepresentation.
What does it mean to negotiate the word desert, when its meanings are fragmented into multiple beings of fugitivity, resistance, hermetism, withdrawal, erasure, emergence, speculative futures, and the mythic? What urgency are we obliged to insist on such negotiations? What emerges or surfaces when we orient ourselves towards the desert from our different positions? What methodologies can perform the totality of the desert as nature and un-nature, as silence and echo, as witness and grief, as memory and map, as home and as the desert itself?
The Desert Will Expand and Carry My Footsteps is a series of talks, performances, and presentations, designed and curated by Tempodesert, followed by a publication, that invites artists, performers, curators, writers, and cultural workers, through which the performativity and the aesthetics are explored, and methodologies are proposed to engage, negotiate, and perform the multiplicity of the desert. Including but not limited to related concepts, and intersections with geopolitics, infrastructures, exploitations, indigeneity, mysticism, climate, and colonial history.
As an editorial team, and through events and a publication, we are intentionally and purposefully committed to creating a dialogical space by bringing different perspectives and positions. Alongside, we are focused but not limited to contributions that situate its context within what is known as the Great Desert Belt that stretches from North Africa to China, crossing the Arabian Peninsula, not only as a geographical backdrop but also as a site of knowledge, environmental realities, migratory histories, colonial cartographies, and speculative possibilities of futures.