Lydia Ourahmane: Tassili

As part of its Open Space programme, the Fondation Louis Vuitton presents Lydia Ourahmane’s “Tassili (2022)“, a film shot in Tassili n’Ajjer. Classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this exceptional mountainous region of the central Sahara Desert extends across 72,000 km²/ 27,799 mi² and is filled with thousands of rock engravings and cave paintings that bear witness to humans, animals, and vegetation that thrived, evolved, and disappeared in the area before climate change transformed it into a desert. The exhibition marks the first presentation of Lydia Ourahmane’s works in France.

To shoot the film, Lydia Ourahmane embarked on a 13 day journey with a team of collaborators, including friends and local guides. They explored the vast arid plateau that is difficult to access due to the hostile conditions as well as military and governmental restrictions. The night and day images of this lunar landscape and its millennia-old paintings shot in 4K, a digital technology qualified as ultra-high definition, are striking in their hyperrealism—questioning the potential for this vertiginous, hypnotic wandering to capture an encounter with a place filled with history and spirituality. The artist invites the viewer to immerse themselves, while simultaneously being guided. She commissioned four musicians – Nicolás Jaar, felicita, Yawning Portal, and Sega Bodega – to each create, separately, a soundtrack. The film also incorporates digital animations made from photogrammetry scans, taken on site in collaboration with the artist Yuma Burgess.

Between fiction and reality, the film “Tassili (2022)” offers a hallucinatory experience, an original quest with mystical overtones that propels us into a visual and sonic journey beyond time.