Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
more committed to developing the new part
of the town than repopulating the ancient
nucleus.
Consequently, preservationist worries that
today make part of daily ideology and practices
in Ouadane seem relatively recent and imported.
The ruins (
ghariba
), nowadays circumscribed
by the walls built with the help of Portuguese
funding - testify to a much more recent past
(and therefore, from a semantic point of view,
much more insignifi cant) than tourists can imag-
ine. They possess, nonetheless, a fundamental
worth - rightly accrued by the circumscription
that has improved its display - since, in the eyes
of the visitor, they claim the need to preserve, or
shall I say, to salvage local patrimony. In the
eyes of the tourist, ruins are the witnesses to a
signalled endangered authenticity that you need
to preserve at all cost (Fig. 15.5).
By now, you can surmise an ironic move-
ment in this touristic encounter: museums,
walls, routes that have been painstakingly
planned to ensure the comfort and safety of the
new nomadic tourists, contrive the paradoxical
sedentarization of an essentially nomad culture.
Daily travelling objects, scarce and fugacious -
tents, rifl es, camel milk gourds, saddles - are
captured, accumulated and held still to be clas-
sifi ed side by side with Neolithic blade and
arrowheads (Fig. 15.6).
Like distance, time is annihilated in a fi eld of
cultural remains. But this is the only way of pro-
viding consumable visibility to a culture that is
too fl uid because of its mobility and too opaque
because of its exoticism. The next step, still at an
early stage in Ouadane but already emerging in
larger towns such as Attar or turistifi ed ones such
as Chinguetti, is to re-semantize the objects
through more sophisticated narratives that pro-
vide them with a cultural meaning, such as those
made by more experienced guides, or the cura-
tors of museums and libraries. These narratives
are now obviously in motion and are produced
in the dialogue and negotiations with the tourists
that stop and have a chat with them. As else-
where, culture displayed is always intertextual
and tailored to the audience expectations. For
the time being, their museographic ineptitude is
more adaptable to collage, pastiche, irony and
fragmentation, which constitute a trend that dif-
fers from the techniques of interpretation and
theming of classical museography (although, in
fact, that is the one they crave). For now, the
result is ironically closer to some displays that
Fig. 15.5.
Japanese tourists at the
ancienne ville
. Copyright Maria Cardeira da Silva, CEAS/CRIA, FCT.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search