Christian Vium

CHRISTIAN VIUM, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, was awarded a Fejos Fellowship in Ethnographic Film in September 2021 to aid research and editing on “Tales of the Nomadic City.” Tales of a Nomadic City is a poetic feature-length experimental documentary about one of the fastest growing, yet least known, capital cities in the world: Nouakchott in Mauritania. It explores the growth of an unlikely sedentary, urban center constructed ex-nihilo in 1957, now harboring more than a million inhabitants, the majority of whom have partaken in nomadic livelihoods reconfigured by recurring droughts in the Sahara and Sahel region. Part of a larger project that spans more than 15 years of ongoing research, the film aims to rewrite the history of the city from its margins. Through a multimodal, collaborative approach, it opens to an immersive rendition of the city as a living archive of memories and aspirations entangled in the everyday tactics of survival in a nomad-sedentary continuum at the intersection of desert and city. ‘Tales of a Nomadic City’ forms part of a larger collaborative and community-based multi-platform project chronicling the city of Nouakchott in Mauritania. Through co-creation with inhabitants, organizations, and institutions as well as authors, artists, and filmmakers, we rewrite the history of the city, affording new democratic narratives for the future. The project consists of several integrated components: an interactive online platform, the feature documentary film (90 minutes), a series of VR short films, exhibitions, various publications including a monograph.