Sense of place

Keynote by Felwine Sarr

Symposium ” Sens of Place “

Raw Academy, Dakar, December 2024

Sometimes we pass through places without looking at them, without being fully aware of their density. Circulating zombies, passers-by inattentive to our presence and anchorage, we streak through them like will-o’-the-wisps in the night. Sometimes places inhabit us, take us over, haunt us, make us, disorientate us. Sometimes we miss places. That we are absent and that their presence in us is gaping. Sometimes places are inhospitable to us, we are not welcome there.

Our relationship with the world is largely determined by the way we occupy spaces, configure and inhabit them. But also by the way they affect us and make us. With this in mind, I’d like to explore the relationship we have with the places, spaces and territories we inhabit and pass through, where we stay for a long time or just for a while; the web of relationships we weave with our environments, the place we occupy in them, the way we create and are created by places. These topographies can also be sensitive, dreamlike, poetic and imaginary. Dreamt places are no less real, we inhabit their texture and they configure our realities.

The quest I am pursuing is that of a just and fulfilling relationship with the world, the earth, the cosmos. It is the quest for a way of inhabiting it that is fruitful.

The first meditation to which I would like to invite you is that of the first astonishment recounted to us by one of the founding texts of the Semitic monotheisms : the biblical text. It all begins with nostalgia for the Garden of Eden. The original place that was stolen from us so that we could embark on the adventure of knowledge. The fall into this world into which we were thrown. The elements and their furious presence. The water, the air, the mountains, the rivers, the vast plains, the lush vegetation, the deserts and their radiance. The astonishment of the gaze that rests on these vistas. Places preserved in their primordial bareness. The need to establish a habitat on earth in order to live, survive, protect ourselves from predators and perpetuate ourselves. The need to find and guarantee the means of subsistence, but also to weave dreams and daydreams. When these run out, to wander and search for other places. Then one day, stop wandering in the land of Nod.

This first meditation is about stopping the wandering that made us build cities. It is also a reflection on the loss of astonishment. A meditation on the city as a place we create to stop questing for the places that were given to us and stolen from us, in biblical myth.

On the city and civilisation.

It would seem that cities first appeared in High Antiquity, between 3500 and 1500 BC, in the fertile regions of the Nile, in the kingdom of Kush. Twenty-five centuries BC, the city of Kerma, in the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but also on the banks of the Ganges and Yangtze rivers. Cities are thought to be linked to the invention of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle. There are several mythical accounts of the origin of cities. According to the Bible, it was Cain, the farmer, who built one of the first cities, Enoch, in the land of Nod (the land of wandering). Enoch means genesis, beginning. Crafts and art are said to have been born there. In Christian teleology, the ultimate destination is the heavenly Jerusalem. Everything begins with the city and ends with the city. The city is thus the symbol of the perfection of the world to come, but also the symbol of man’s perdition when his will to power blinds him, as the Tower of Babel reminds us. However, the city is above all the human work par excellence, where the dialectic of the one and the many, of diversity and otherness, unfolds. Ever since the fall of man, he has been condemned to live in it, and perhaps to fulfil himself in it or lose himself in it. Whether ancient, medieval or modern, the city is the space where individual and social life unfold and concatenate. It is a space configured so that the necessities of communal life – security, education, the economy, communication routes, the various activities that community life requires – are articulated there for the benefit of its inhabitants. However, it is more than just functional: it is the site of a collective adventure geared towards social, political and cultural goals. The social body is more than the sum of the individuals that make it up; it is part of a common project for living together that goes beyond functional concerns; we could even say that a city is a project for building an ideal city.

The African continent has the highest urbanisation growth rate in the world and this will continue to increase. Today, 471 million people, or around 50% of Africans, live in cities. Projections suggest that Africa will be the most populous continent in 2050, with over 2.2 billion people, ahead of China and India. By 2030, Lagos will have 25 million inhabitants, Kinshasa 16 million, Cairo 14 million and Dakar 7 million. Current and future African cities face a number of challenges: spatial, environmental, demographic and security-related. Dealing with them requires urban planning and addressing the ecological issues that follow. These challenges are already acute today, and those in charge of planning our cities will have to respond appropriately.

There are several (possible) levels of reading the city : technical (urbanism, planning, architecture), social, symbolic. I’d rather see the city as the place where our imaginations and our conceptions of communal life can be read. The city as a sign and an archive that tells us about the present and whose lineaments indicate the futures we wish to build.

A place is a space where elements are distributed in a relationship of coexistence. This relationship is often fixed and the configuration of positions is fixed. A Territory is defined by the set of movements that unfold in its possibilities. It is a space of circulation and spawning.

African cities are territories, with shifting configurations. They are living bodies engaged in processes of growth and metamorphosis. These dynamics, of which the city is the bearer, are closely linked to the vision of the world of those who not only live there, but who inhabit it.

The city did not appear in Africa with the colonial fact. It predates it. Ancient and medieval Africa were dotted with cities. Kerma, the capital of Kush, was founded 25 centuries BC. In medieval Africa, there were several major cities: Gao, Timbuktu, Benin City (Nigeria), etc. They were more populous than Lisbon, Venice and London, and all had their own particularities: some were desert cities built on sandy plains, others around oases or on the banks of rivers, while others, like Oualata in the empire of Ghana, were caravan cities. Some have disappeared, while others, like Gao and Oualata, still exist today. However, most of our contemporary African cities have a history that is closely linked to colonisation. Significant proportions of their current faces have been shaped by the colonial fact. Colonial cities were built against their inhabitants and configured for the necessities of resource extraction. Fanon describes Algiers as a compartmentalised and segregated city in Les Damnés de la terre. However, the original, mythical and symbolic matrices of African cities predate the fact colonial?

How do we build our cities without destroying their original matrix ? How do these spaces survive in our contemporary configurations ?

How is the experience of our cities affected by economic and cultural globalisation    This can both enrich and alter our spaces? So how can the way we think about our cities not be an echo chamber for a world in decay? In our way of inhabiting places, it’s a question of not simply enduring the world. The work of mental disoccupation consists of perpetually reconstructing the meaning of place, in order to free ourselves from the mental colony that sits at the heart of our imaginations. To do this, culture and all forms of creativity remain precious resources. Art as a way of disengaging the eye, reactivating the senses and configuring spaces. Architecture, the visual arts, painting, literature and music are ways of inhabiting places, affecting and shaping them with a sensitive, muted presence, sometimes solid and material, sometimes sonic and visual.

Taking back the historical initiative means starting by building cities that reflect its singularities and its vision of the world. It’s about making the city a place of expression of the civilisation we are building and want to build. The city is an organic body with its own, often uncoordinated, logic. It emerges from the plurality of gestures that make it. It is also produced by those who live in it.

To inhabit a place, a space, a body, a geography, a city, is not just to settle there. It means choosing a form of settlement, a mode of occupation and deployment; the kind of relationship we have with the space that welcomes us. Making our cities habitable for all means making them open cities that assume and desire their cosmopolitan condition.  Moreover, it cannot be otherwise, for cosmopolitanism is our becoming.

It’s about making our cities more inclusive and functional not just for the elites living in its beautiful neighbourhoods, but making them places offering spaces for social mixing. The way in which the city is configured informs our way of forming a community and the values we place at the heart of our sociability. We need to design cities that do not exclude, because life can only be lived in the midst of humans and other living things, but only if we are fully recognised and accepted. Cities that leave no one behind, the less well off, migrants, passers-by. Cities for people who walk; people who spend time outdoors, people who stroll, people who dream. Those who stop time, leaning against a wall or sitting on a bench. Leaving unfinished spaces in the construction of our cities (spaces of creativity) that show what is possible. We need to create places of memory, places where our heritage is preserved and brought to life, where our history is embodied in the way we live and think about it. But they are also places of culture and conviviality, where we come together as a community. This altermetropolisation would be based on our differences, our symbolic and cosmogonic resources, our know-how and interpersonal skills. It would produce new urban commons.

Building cities that don’t scratch the sky, not because they lack ambition, but because their inhabitants choose to privilege those interstices where we meet, where we live and where we are fully. Here, construction begins with destruction, the destruction of mimicry and self-circumvention.

Leaving the premises.

Then one day, necessarily the wandering resumes, the journey as a regenerating necessity. Renewing resources, expanding imaginations, reanimating life, because although these places where we live allow us to flourish, they can be the hotbeds of our withering. They can become our tombs. Those of a slow, programmed death. The graves of devitalization, when resources run out. All resources ; spaces, means of subsistence, air, water, but also mental horizons, ideas, beauty, meaning, hope.

How do those who suffer the injustice of the world inhabit the world ? How do those who do not have the luxury of uprooting, those who do not travel (or at the risk of their lives), those whose wandering is immobile, experience a world whose vastness is denied them. There are places that hold people captive: prisons and transit camps. According to NGO reports, people displaced by conflicts stay in refugee camps for an average of 17 years. Asylum seekers in host countries are forced to occupy unwanted places. All these people are obliged to live in places that hinder their freedom and often wither away their lives. 

The imperious necessity here is that of displacement, escape, dodging, evasion, marooning. Displacement as a practice of freedom. The movement it implies allows space to be reconfigured and enlarged. Chestnuts leave the fields and plains behind and head for the mountains and forests, where they invent their own territory and way of life. They disengage themselves from places. The practice of dis-embedding. Counter-totalitarian gestures.

When escape is impossible, what to do ? Affect places with practices that make them liveable, that corrode their inhospitality and lighten their burdens. Inhabiting our dreams and imaginations, drawing on the riches we’ve already built up in our inner worlds. Even in the most dehumanised places – the hold of a slave ship, concentration camps, the Gulag, prisons – humans have continued to produce culture to make life bearable. Here, culture is an intimate resource, enabling us to inhabit inhospitable worlds.

This meditation on the meaning of place cannot, however, overlook the way in which we inhabit the primordial place that enables our lives and is our biotope.

The question of Ecology.

Thinking about the ecological question is crucial because the first place we have made vulnerable is our biotope. Through our actions, through our civilisation, through the way we live in our environments, we are mortgaging the conditions for the reproduction of life on earth, albeit unequally, but certainly. One question that arises is how to get out of what Malcolm Ferdinand calls “colonial inhabitation”. Is this gesture the result of a civilisational fact or is it deeply ingrained in our psyche ?

In our long quest to perpetuate our lives (on earth) we built cities and constructed the world.  Then, daughter of our hubris, came crisis : spiritual (first), ecological, social, economic, environmental (then). A climate gone haywire, a global economy and lifestyles that are accelerating the entropy of living things. A civilisation that is de-civilising and jeopardising the conditions for the reproduction of life on earth, as well as its very survival. A techno-capitalist civilisation that is accelerating the risks of ecocide and futuricide.

In a previous reflection, I wondered about how to inhabit the world by building better relationships in it. The mistake was perhaps to think of these questions solely in the space of the world, which is our creation. We have built the world with its cities, its objects and its artefacts. The civilisational crisis we are experiencing, which is forcing us to rethink our relationship with life, death and the earth, is a crisis in the way we inhabit our primary ecological home, the earth. To inhabit places is first to inhabit the earth : the primal and definitive place.

As Val Plumwood argues it’s about getting out of the denial of belonging to the earth that leads us to wish to eradicate nature’s otherness by subjecting it to our exclusive will.  To recognise the otherness of natural things, their given character, is to recognise the other-than-human foundations of our being ; it is to assume the physical and sensitive reality of the world, only in this way will we be able to inhabit the earth without destroying it.

To recognise, then, the other-than-human foundations of our being in the world and to draw all the implications from them. This involves taking the measure of the continuity between humans and nature, but also the latter’s own agentivity. It is certainly impossible to avoid any instrumental relationship with nature, but it is possible to admit the irreducible, unavailable part of the earth as well as its agentivity. Aldo Leopold reminds us that our vocation is not to master and dominate the living world, but to recognise that ” We are full members of the biotic community.” Our existence depends on support systems that are both human and non-human.

The complex relations that constitute bodily life must lead us no longer just to think of the human ideal, but to attend to the complex set of relations without which we do not exist (Donna Haraway). We cannot subsist without biological worlds and those social forms of life that are human-nonhuman assemblages.

End the dis-alliance with the earth requires a break with intellectual frameworks founded on the great dualisms (nature/culture, body-spirit, mind-matter). To better inhabit the earth and form a community with its inhabitants (the living whole). Gaston Paul Effa, Hervé Yanguem and the late Lionel Manga invite us to adopt an animist ethic and an ecology of relationships. These enable us to free ourselves from conceptual and imaginary frameworks based on des-alliance.

Their animistic philosophy invites us to rethink the ethical and philosophical foundations, as well as the imaginaries of our relationship with living things. Understanding and acknowledging the fact that our condition (as living humans) is consubstantially linked to that of living things and the interactions we have with them commits us to cooperating with existing communities by establishing mutual relationships with them, based on reciprocity, care and repair.

We can inhabit the earth in a strong, impetuous and destructive way. But we can also inhabit it in a fluid, reversible, fleeting and removable way. Aware of our condition as passers-by, Frédérique Neyrat invites us to leave the world its unbuildable part. To sometimes undress it, to consider that we don’t just inhabit the earth, but that it inhabits us.

An ethic of hospitality opens the community to all those entitled to its care, that is, to all living beings and all communities of existing beings. They are entitled to it. They have a right to life. I will return to the idea of a cosmopolitics of hospitality at greater length on Friday.

          Before moving on to the conclusion, I would like to evoke a place, the human body, which is our first interface with the world and thus reduce the focus of space to this original delimitation. The human body is the place from which we can never leave, the space to which the entirety of existence condemns us. A multiple place: physical, intimate, it is a focus for engendering, a place for aesthetic expression, a wall for transmitting the sensible, a space for representations, a relational object.

Inhabiting places is first and foremost about inhabiting your body and deploying its potential. Tattooed, made-up, masked, transformed, it can become utopian. Danced, it becomes a dilated body that inscribes fleeting forms in space, inhabiting it in a removable and reversible way. A body that engages in an artistic performance reconfigures the surrounding spaces, whether architectural, sonic, plastic or human, these become a resonating chamber of the sensitive.

Receptacle of meanings, the body is also the place of the intangible, sometimes of absence, of lack, of fullness. Artistic practices sharpen its senses, its receptivity and its distribution. It is both a territory and a topography, where we can infinitely refine a sense of place.

Coda: Inhabiting the Metamorphosis.

I’d like to end with a thought for Joe Ouakam’s court which was housed at 17 rue Jules Ferry in Dakar with its kapok tree and ecosystems. This place was endowed with a Saturnian presence, enriched and maintained by the master of the house, the painter and artist Issa Samb. Despite the mobilisation of his friends and the people at the Agit art laboratory, it could not be preserved as it was after Joe Ouakam’s departure. Caught up as it was in the inescapable movement and ongoing metamorphosis of the site. This raises the question of our ability to preserve places with a strong symbolic charge, when globalising urbanisation makes them vulnerable. How do we keep ghosts in their homes so that they can haunt us when we doze off? Joe Ouakam has gone through the looking glass and become a spirit floating over the city.

In the course of a lifetime we pass through a multiplicity of places ; the family home, the school, the neighbourhood, the places of work, leisure, the terroirs where we live, the regions where we travel, sometimes the countries we visit or those in which we stay. Places change, including those that we travel through on a daily basis; they evolve and metamorphose, sometimes imperceptibly to our eyes that have been dulled by habit and routine. Places move, even when they seem motionless.

The affectation of a place lasts only for a time. That of a dream, of a dimension of a fully inhabited time, of a presence that digs its furrow and inscribes a quality of presence over time. But places inevitably change. It’s up to us to learn to live with their transformation, even as we tirelessly restore and revitalise them. We can only inhabit places through the quality of a presence that we keep alive, for a time. That of our passage through this dimension of existence and the experience we make of it.