Paper short abstract:

Is this nostalgia, where your state of mind is at the heart of the situation, or despair in the face of a situation where you are a stranger? How do you react to the destruction and disappearance of villages, their inhabitants and their cults?

Paper long abstract:

Is this nostalgia, where your state of mind is at the heart of the situation, or despair in the face of a situation where you are a stranger?

How do you react to the destruction and disappearance of villages, their inhabitants and their cults?

Recently, flipping through my notebooks, taken during the shooting of a film in 1992, in the village of Arou, 800kms North of the capital Bamako( Republique du Mali), a certain nostalgia, or rather concern and despair, mingled.

What has become of the priests, the sacred places, the knowledge?

The lines of translation enumerate, explain and transcribe the genealogies, and the precision of the information, the names of places, caves, etc., give this work a timeless "out of the ground" dimension. I can't speak of nostalgia as Angé Olivia and Berliner David understand it. Still, I must admit to a certain despair in the face of the knowledge we've gathered, which has undoubtedly gone to ashes.