Neighbouring Libya and Niger, Tassili n’Ajjer, translated by the exhibition wall text as the “once fertile plateau of rivers,” is now a cultural heritage site with rock formations featuring numerous prehistoric cave drawings. Depicting Tassili n’Ajjer’s landscape and prehistoric art, Lydia Ourahmane’s 47-minute film Tassili (2022) follows the homecoming of a rock that the artist picked up from the site on a scouting trip prior to filming. As the film plays on a loop in Mercer Union’s gallery space turned viewing room, animated 3-D reconstructions of this rock accompany a musical exquisite corpse composed by musicians Nicolás Jaar, felicita, Yawning Portal, and Sega Bodega.

As a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site, Tassili’s monumentality invokes the persistence of ancient objects and cultural otherness, even as these descriptors are themselves fickle and incredibly precarious. The cosmopolitanism of monument management organizations like UNESCO has given rise to the hyper-monumental, where memories specific to a culture are othered, mystified, preemptively fossilized and made into a simulation of themselves, under the assumption of universality. Aware of Tassili’s losing race against time as cave drawings wither and water sources deplete, precarity and urgency underlay the making of the film. Due to political tensions with neighbouring countries, to gain access to the site, Ourahmane and a team of international collaborators had to obtain visas and follow government-approved routes, relying on local Tuareg guides.

Ourahmane’s representation of Tassili is in conversation with the long history of photographic documentation of the site, where the forceful penetration of a camera’s gaze is imbricated with France’s archeological pilfering of Tassili. Monumentality’s key feature is its commemoration of a specific community. The global visibility that comes with being declared a World Heritage site, and Tassili’s history of archeological treatment, reduces the site and the people who live there as exotic, static, and dead. The hyper-monumental cannot conceive of Tassili as a living entity that actively co-produces meaning with its viewers—meanings that are subject to ongoing re-evaluation.

In Ourahmane’s animation, the rock wanders in an other(ed)world in which language edges on ecstatic incomprehension. There is a moment in the film where the camera lens inches forward in between dark, chilling crevices of rock formations, refusing a viewer’s gaze and invoking an elusive and uninviting spiritual guardianship against being seen. In this way, the film resists comprehension mediated by language, as the ecological perturbs the syntactical. Edward Said, in his essay “Reflections on Exile” (1984), ponders, “We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy.” In Tassili, the risk of withering cave drawings raises perplexing questions about life-governing rules (like that of the hyper-monument) sedimented through language, and the contradictory act of preservation.

Lurking just beyond the frame, the terror of military drones instigated by the hyper-legalization and surveillance of Tassili buzzes incessantly in the background. But as the light dawns, the viewer is also generously granted the sublimity of Tassili’s awe-inspiring landscape and rock art, decidedly in the foreground of the film—a sight transcending relentless linguistic contextualization. Rock emerges from earth as magma solidifies into continental crusts, before destabilizing and dispersing. This is a process both other to and preceding the human, repeatedly grounding and ungrounding our environments and cultures. The rock’s psychedelic returns mediated by the film bring to mind a question Said poses in “Reflections on Exile”: “What is it like to be born in a place, to stay and live there, to know that you are of it, more or less forever?” The temporality of rock alludes to a time before naturalized forms of socio-political organization such as the nation state. While socially accepted truths like the hyper-monument are reiterated through language, repetition opens up the chance of fissures, introducing productive crises in meaning-making.

Entangled in the tension between preservation and ruin, Tassili sheds light on what would be sights otherwise unseen for global audiences. The film takes moving image as an interrogative tool to rigorously confront the political dimension of its monumentality, grappling with the forces that enable and disable movements through the site. The rock’s displacement and subsequent return have been shown in Paris, Algiers, New York, Tunis, and Toronto. Tassili’s minimal use of written and spoken language (the only instance is in the ending credits) enables a cultural translatability, without reductive universalization across borders. Travelling to audiences of vast geographical differences, Tassili’s depiction of sedimentation—linguistic and otherwise—evokes a yearning to be of a place, and the ability to relate to the world as we don’t know it.