Tales of a Nomadic City - Interview with Christian Vium & Med Lemin Rajel by Cosima Kopp

 

The term “nomadic city” seems contradictory, can you explain why you choose this title? 

Christian Vium: Up until recently Mauritania was almost entirely nomadic. The French colonial administration began constructing Nouakchott in the late 1950s. Quite quickly people from the desert areas started coming into the city. So, in a sense, the city evolved beyond sedentary logic. The city can be seen as a prolongation of that nomadic kind of life that is still present today in the minds of the people that make the city.  

Med Lemin Rajel: Many people living in the city today came because of climate change, droughts that  pushed people to go from the desert to the city, but the city was not prepared for  that. Today they are navigating in a modern city, but they are navigating as nomads.  The city is moving like a nomadic camp, similar to what a traditional nomad does: if  there is no green on this side we move to the other.  

Can you explain how these two aspects of nomadic and sedentary life relate to Deleuze and Guattari?  

Christian Vium: In terms of Deleuze and Guattari, that is a more philosophical reference, they speak of the logic of the state or the sedentary logic, as this very particular grid system that they call the striated space. This is what we know from other cities like New York, where you have streets and avenues. You actually have the same thing in Nouakchott, at least in the original city plan that was built by the French colonial administration. You have the avenues and the streets that kind of define the urban space or topography. Deleuze and Guattari contrast that with what they call the smooth space, a space that is not defined by this particular grid logic. That’s the space that they relate to the nomad. It’s an analytical way of thinking because the two coexist. It’s not like you have striated space here and then smooth space there, for me Nouakchott is the perfect example of that. Because of this conflation of the nomadic logic with the sedentary kind of system and the way that they coexist.  

Christian, your research in Nouakchott started in 2009, what were your first impressions of the city? 

Christian Vium: At first I would work mainly with people in the desert areas, but with the years I noticed connections between the desert and the city.  In my own way I had to figure out what kind of a place this city was. Initially I was just walking around in the outskirts of the city, carrying my camera, a tripod and a GPS to register the photographs I made. For me it was a way of figuring out, what does this place look like? I was working mainly in the peripheral areas, because those were the areas where people would come from the desert and they were not very well documented. People would invite me in for tea or a conversation. I discovered that people had their own photographs that were not available anywhere else, family photographs that showed their lives. It was a different prism to understand the city than what I could find in the ‘official’ archives like newspapers or the colonial French archives that show a very particular kind of history of the city. So, from the onset this project developed as an assemblage of different perspectives. When speaking about history and archives, we’ve been discussing a lot about this vernacular archive that is a popular archive that is not written down. It exists in songs and in poetry and in stories that people tell each other. It is something very characteristic of a nomadic lifestyle in a way. It’s a form of poetry that’s part of Nouakchott that Med and I are both completely intrigued by and want to understand and transmit to others in various ways. 

How did your working relationship start? And how does your collaborative workflow look like? 

Med Lemin Rajel: When we first met, we both had quite a common sense of what both of us were looking for. I practise more filmmaking, but I’m also from a sociology background. When I came to the city very young and there were so many things around me I couldn’t understand, that’s why I decided to study sociology. Developing this project together over time, we get more and more understanding of how we learn from each other. I think we both provided a good point of view to the project. I am just someone from Nouakchott who had to understand the city, because I had my internal perspective and view of it. One of the things I learned quite a lot from Christians research, how he tries from his outside perspective to understand what people explain to him, but he also follows or sits down and watches how things happen. 

Christian Vium: I was preparing to do a body of film work based on the research in the preceding decade and then I discovered Med, a person I had never met before, who was a filmmaker in Nouakchott. Suddenly I met somebody who knows the history of film, who has experience in filmmaking, translating, production and with a huge network in the city. It was really a perfect match for us. Somehow, we figured out this new way of doing collaborative work that actually produces a lot of new knowledge, but not in the kind of conventional way where I would come as a researcher with predefined questions. Here, we’re trying to do it in a more playful and hopefully levelled way. I think that’s where the filmmaking and the workshops we organize are so productive because it’s just another way of engaging and being together. 

How do these workshops look like? 

Christian Vium: We’re working on a feature film that is a hybrid ethno-fiction that bends the genre between documentary and fiction. Most of the scenes and the people are based on research, but not all of what happens is a documentary that just unfolds, scenes are partially scripted and sequenced.    

Med Lemin Rajel: We workshop with different people around the city, we introduce them to our film idea and ask them questions. Last time we workshopped one of the main characters in the film, an 11-year-old girl, with a group of young women. They had experienced many of the same things, and added more information about the character based on their own experiences. This character is built out of so many people. Reflecting not only one person, but reflecting a generation that has the same experiences. 

Christian Vium: When we’re together in a conversation or a workshop we compliment each other. I can permit myself to question that from the outside and push people a little bit sometimes. Sometimes when you’re doing more conventional research, it can be a bit artificial. I’m the foreign professor, supposed to be very well educated, and people can feel intimidated by me because I’m asking questions that they think they should be able to respond to, and they have an idea of what answers I might want. Whereas in workshops people stop thinking about it like that and just start interacting, coming up with ideas, and suddenly something quite magical happens and hopefully we are able to somehow hold on to that and communicate this. For us it’s been a way of developing ideas and then testing them with people and developing new, constantly making new iterations. The installation of parts of the work is part of the same kind of process of analysing material and thinking through material, getting new ideas and using it as a vehicle for constantly thinking around questions in a new way and together with people. 

What made you choose using VR for this project?  

Christian Vium: I was filming during my PhD field work in Nouakchott and in the desert, and I always knew that I wanted to develop it into larger films eventually. I was scripting along the way step by step and at one point I thought now is the time to start to see if that could be the next larger iteration of my work and that’s when I met Med. Since then we’ve been working together. We applied for the CPH:LAP (Copenhagen DOX) and there we developed the VR prototype.  

Med Lemin Rajel: When we were developing the VR experience we decided that people from Nouakchott are going to be our main audience. We wanted to have something in the medium that people can refer to, a father or an uncle, sitting next to them. He tells them the story of how he arrived here and how everything happened around him. We want the audience to feel in the space they know, as a young Mauritanian in a certain part of the city, everything that’s presented there, it’s something they can refer to. The international audiences will have an experience as if they arrived in Nouakchott for the first time, sitting next to someone making tea and just talking. At certain times he doesn’t speak, he’s just sitting there and making tea. But this connection we really wanted to show in that way. 

In which way is exhibiting your work through art installations part of your analytical process?  

Christian Vium: When you do a film, you have to be quite specific about what and how you want to communicate, because you have to take people with you on a narrative journey so that they don’t just switch channels. Whereas in an exhibition, I think you can be a little bit more open and associative in the way that you work. You can put an image that you know people are going to have difficulty in understanding, it can be something that you want to test, whether that influences something, so it’s a more open experimental way for me to approach material. You’re in it with your body and your senses. So it’s another kind of thing when you’re in front of one channel image and you have the sound around you and the stories laid out for you. Then in different ways you can work with how you speak with audiences around the work. We’re fortunate to have a workshop in Freiburg and I think we’re gonna take that opportunity to learn from the participants as well and give them an invitation to think with us around the material that we present and that may very well find its way to another iteration later on. 

You are currently working on a project called “Revisioning the African City”, can you tell us more about this new iteration of your research?  

Christian Vium: For a number of years I’ve been applying for a larger research project that expands on some of the methods and approaches from this project into three cities on the African continent: Nairobi in Kenya, Cape Town in South Africa and Nouakchott in Mauritania. Three very different cities with very different histories, sizes and challenges. I’m really excited to see what will happen when this same kind of work is then extended into a collaborative project that is taking place in very different locations and to see what the workshops with young people will generate. I expect some of the same questions will be relevant. I’m excited to see what happens when a young person from Nairobi is speaking with a young person from Nouakchott or Cape Town. What kind of a conversation will they have about the future of African cities? I think that we need to destabilise the way that we think of what an African city is today. And I think the best way to do that is to work with the people that live in those cities, and represent the future of those cities. Something that strikes me in a lot of media coverage about the African continent is that you don’t have a lot of stories that speak to the creativity of young people and the kind of completely amazing capacity young people have for revisioning the world. Instead it’s become this story of overpopulation, problems and conflict. I’m not saying that those are not challenges, but I think that all of us have to tap into the creativity of young people, for example, on the African continent and certainly that’s what we’ve been doing, Med and I together. 

 

Christian Vium (b. 1980, Denmark), is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Aarhus University (DK). In addition to time-based media, he works increasingly with large-scale immersive installations integrating photography, films, sound, and archive material. His work has been exhibited in 40+ national and international exhibitions. Vium is Principal Investigator on the research projects ‘Revisioning the African City from the Periphery’ (Independent Research Foundation Denmark, 2025-2028) and ‘North Atlantic Everyday Stories’ (Velux Foundation, 2024-2027).

Med Lemine Rajel (b. 1986, Mauritania), is a filmmaker and cinematographer with his own film production company based in Nouakchott, Mauritania. With ten years of experience as a freelance video- and photojournalist working for clients such as AFP, BBC, Aljazeera, the UN, Al Araby, DMI, the Goethe-Institut and GIZ. Founder of the Teranim Popular Art Center in Nouakchott, and cinematographer, editor, and producer on several award-winning documentary films, including ‘The Last Shelter’ (CPH DOX main award 2021) and ‘The father Probably’ (Promotional Prize of Oberhausen short film festival 2024). BA degree in Sociology, Université de Nouakchott, Mauritania.