“Songlines” or legends of the Australian desert

theThe Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac hosts a traveling exhibition designed under the auspices of the National Museum of Australia, dedicated to the “Song of the Paths” (songs) of indigenous peoples. The human presence on this island-continent, attesting 60,000 years ago, has formed a mosaic of ethnic groups that practice 250 different languages, but are united by common stories. The challenge here is to reclaim a relationship with the world that is at once cosmogonic, topographical, nurturing, aesthetic, and ethical, according to categorizations of perception and narrative modes that are entirely unique to the syncretism.

According to Australian desert mythology, the country was created by ancestral beings who entrusted the environmental protection of the lands to their descendants. Their knowledge is embodied through epic myths with integrative value, a kind of cultural globalization that includes all aspects of life. Chosen for the fair, the journey of the Seven Sisters is that of several young girls relentlessly pursued by a lustful and cruel sorcerer, Eurla, endowed like Greek Zeus with the malevolent power of transformation.

excellent. The peculiarity of the introductory story grafted onto this journey of quest is that it includes polymorphic knowledge embodied in songs, ceremonies, and paintings, the purpose of which is to map on the landscape of water points and nourishing oases and medicinal plantations and the dangers and resources of the deserts of central and western Australia, an astral and practical definition of a vitality whose paths live under the stars . Blue guide for use by walkers, Olympus who obeys a “Ecosystem perception of reality”, According to the expressionEmmanuel CasaheroHead of the Paris Museum.

Paul Klee from the bush. To do this, the exhibition artfully alternates, around a 7-meter-high dome, ritual objects, cave-inspired paintings, photographs, videos of songs and dances, testimonies of the sages who ensure the transmission, and a complete likeness of the celestial and the dance. Terrestrial life is partially digitized in the archives of memory. Remarkable are the paintings produced by contemporary Aboriginal artists for the exhibition, which capture the marks encountered during the legendary trek: tracks, footprints, ledge maps, representations of sacred animals, and the many molecular taquisite mosaics that Paul Klee’s bush art could evoke. The road makes it known, the general song is consistent with the universe. Universal reading guide?

As brutal depredations, deforestation, and water wars alert us to the urgency of climate protection, this wisdom of scarcity grafted into a universal cosmogony offers an immemorial lesson in which the great intuition of the whole is combined with the pedagogy of tangible survival. The subsequent seven sisters by a malevolent wizard, through these road songs, draw lines of fighting strength that can serve as an example for future choices.

Lines of songs. The Song of Australian Desert Trails.” Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, to 2 July 2023. Index: Ed. Musée El Viso/Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, 260 pages, 43€.

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