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Paper short abstract:

This communication deals with the common drift that affect people and plant beings in contexts of war, considering two artistic situations: Galb'Echaque by El Montassir in Southern Maroc, and the process when the remains of “Ténéré tree” were taken to the Boubou-Hama National Museum in Niger.

Paper long abstract:

“The attachment to an idea of a fixed landscape of Earth and humanity is the deepest mark of the Anthropocene” insists Krenak (2020). In various places, the experience of the catastrophe immobilized us in feelings of incomprehension of insurgencies of extreme inter-human violence. The awareness of the non-exclusivity of human beings on the planet walks amid successive fractures between the ecology of society and nature, pointing to the need for a critical refoundation of knowledge, both scientific and artistic. Cultural capitalism is moving towards the homogenization and destitution of politics in the arts, it participates in the aesthetic wars linked to imperialism and white racial hegemony (Nzegwu, 2003).

This communication deals with the capture and disconnection that affect people and plant beings in a common drift and the same destiny of impermanence, given the lasting effects of wars on those who lived them and those who did not experience them. I resort to two situations linked to historical-environmental in Sahara: 1) Artist Abdessamed El Montassir's reflection on traumas overshadowed by the dominant story in his work Galb'Echaque (2021), pointing to the need for an open aesthetic (Diagne, 2017). 2) The process that combines art, desertification, and human mobility when, in 1973, the remains of the “Ténéré tree”, a symbol of navigation in the desert, were brought to the Boubou-Hama National Museum in Niger.

The possibility of a non-human planetary future remains amid extractive strategies and academic indifference in the Capitalocene (Moore 2015, Demos 2017, Bourriaud 2021) driven by techno-optimism.