Tales of a Nomadic City is a long-term collaborative research project spanning two decades. Centred on Nouakchott, the capital city of Mauritania. It assembles oral histories, vernacular archives, rare archival film, and photographs, a feature documentary about the city, as well as a VR experience. The material is progressively given form and published in books, exhibitions, and online, meeting various audiences and inviting people to revision the history of the city.

For this installation at CAFx, an immersive VR experience co-directed by Med Lemine Rajel & Christian Vium is presented for the first time, alongside film excerpts from the project are accompanied by various experimental outputs. The VR experience, developed as part of the CPH:LAB incubator for immersive storytelling (2023-2024) is based on two decades of anthropological research in Nouakchott and a manuscript developed with inhabitants of the city. Sharing an encounter with Mohamed, a recently sedentarized nomad who now lives on the outskirts of Nouakchott, audiences are invited into one of the fastest growing cities in Africa. Integrating contemporary everyday scenes, rare historical archives and an immersive sound design, the experience reveals the layered and multifaceted history of Nouakchott, providing a remarkable portrait of urban transformation. Though Mohamed’s personal narrative audiences are invited to reflect on the existential consequences of rapid urban development.

Nouakchott was conceived by French colonial politicians, architects, and urban planners, and constructed ex-nihilo in 1958 as the future capital of what was to become the independent Islamic Republic of Mauritania. Little more than a cluster of houses and two wells in the late 1950s, the city is now home to approximately two million people, many of them former nomads originating from the surrounding desert. In the 65-year period following independence in 1960, it is estimated that the percentage of the total population living as nomads in Mauritania diminished from 85 per cent to 7 per cent. The annual growth of the city between 1977 and 1988 alone was estimated at 15 per cent. In the aftermath of the first ’Great Sahelian Drought’ of 1968-1973 and the severe droughts of 1982-1985, the number of nomads is considered to have diminished by 50 per cent. As elsewhere in the Sahel and the Sahara, the droughts were devastating, catapulting the country into a fundamental crisis. This made its mark, not least on the capital city, with a rural exodus, which continues to this day. Tales of a Nomadic City investigates the complex socio-cultural transformations, providing a comprehensive and layered anthropological narrative of this little-known city.

Nouakchott is a prism through which we may comprehend the extreme social transformations in a country that was formerly entirely nomadic and currently facing the compounded challenge of climate change and increasing political instability in the West African region at large. Engaging with the porous interstitial spaces that emerge at the intersection between nomadic and sedentary worlds, or desert and urban worlds, the project takes a cue from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reflections on ‘nomadology’, and the conflation of smooth and striated space. Tales of a Nomadic City presents a multimodal mapping of a city in perpetual transformation.

About the Exhibition

Tales of a Nomadic City (VR) is produced by Copenhagen-based company Khora with the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Independent Research Fund Denmark, the Carlsberg Foundation, Aarhus University, Danish Arts Foundation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Danish institute in Damascus, and the Velux Foundations.