At the musée du quai Branly in Paris, a fascinating exhibition immerses us in the great stories of Aboriginal culture. Immemorial and contemporary.
By Marc Lambron, of the French Academy
Epic of colors. “Kungkarrangkalpa Tjukurrpa” (acrylic on canvas, 2015), by an artists’ cooperative from Papulankutja (Ngaanyatjarra Lands, central Australia).
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Lhe musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac is hosting a traveling exhibition designed under the aegis of the National Museum of Australia, devoted to the “song of the tracks” (songlines) of aboriginal nations. Attested for 60,000 years, the human presence on this island-continent has formed a mosaic of ethnic groups practicing 250 different languages, but federated by common stories. The challenge here is to restore a relationship to the world that is simultaneously cosmogonic, topographical, nurturing, aesthetic, moral, according to categories of perception and narrative modes that are absolutely singular in their civilizational syncretism.
According to the mythologies of the Australian desert, the Country was created by ancestral beings who entrusted their descendants with the ecological safeguard of the territories. Their knowledge is materialized by epic myths with an integrating value, a sort of cultural omnium embracing all aspects of life. The journey of the Seven Sisters was chosen for the exhibition, that is, so many young girls relentlessly pursued by a lustful and cruel sorcerer, Yurla, endowed like the Greek Zeus with an insidious power of metamorphosis.
Stellar. The specificity of the initiatory story grafted onto this journey-pursuit is that it incorporates a polymorphic knowledge materialized in songs, ceremonies, paintings, the purpose of which is to map over the landscapes the water points, the nourishing oases, the medicinal plantations , the perils and resources of the deserts of central and western Australia, an astral yet practical definition of a biotope whose paths run under the stars. A blue Guide for use by walkers, an Olympus obeying a “ecosystemic conception of reality”, according to the expression of Emmanuel Kasarhérou, president of the Parisian museum.
Cosmogony. At the top, members of the artists’ cooperative Tjanpi Desert Weavers (Papulankutja) make the Seven Sisters, sculpted in tjanpi (mixed technique including grasses, branches, raffia, wire, feathers) fly away, according to the mythical story and wool, 2015). Above, “Kungkarangkalpa walka board”, by Malya Teamay (pyrography and acrylic on plywood, Maruku art center, 2015).
A Paul Klee from the bush. To do this, the exhibition alternates ingeniously, around a 7-meter-high dome, ritual objects, cave-inspired paintings, photographs, videos of songs and dances, the testimonies of the Elders who guarantee the transmission, a whole semiology of celestial and terrestrial life partly digitized in a memory archive. Very striking are the paintings produced for the exhibition by contemporary Aboriginal artists, materializing the signs encountered during the mythical journey: tracks, footprints, maps of the edges, representations of sacred animals, so many mosaics of a molecular tachisme which could evoke the art of a Paul Klee of the bush. The road makes it known, the general song agrees with the cosmos. World Reading Manual?
At a time when savage depredations, deforestation and water wars alert us to the urgency of climate protection, this wisdom of scarcity grafted onto a totalizing cosmogony offers an immemorial lesson in which the intuition of the Great All is combined with a pedagogy of concrete survival. The Seven Sisters pursued by a harmful sorcerer draw, through these songs of the road, the lines of force of a fight which could be worth a parable for the choices of the future.
“Song lines. Song of the Australian Desert Tracks”. Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, until July 2, 2023. Catalog: ed. El Viso/Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum, 260 p., €43.
National Museum of Australia – Annieka Skinner/Tjanpi Desert Weavers – the artist/© Agency 2020, Image: National Museum of Australia
2023-04-29 12:55:48
#Songlines #mythology #Australian #desert
