We have often written that ours is a journey, a journey through ideas materialized in cities and peoples: so how can we forget the nomads and their absolutely new ability for us sedentary men to conceive the journey and experience the space?
In the previous issue of our magazine we pinned down an idea for the next millennium, Slowness, and we tried to tell it through a people, the Japanese; the first time, however, we did the opposite by observing the polis of Greece and ended up writing about Harmony.
This time nomads and space have come together intertwined as they are, almost as if to tell us that space without the continuous movement of these men would lose its consistency, a bit like the story of the ancient forgotten threshold that disappeared the day no one came to visit it anymore.
A journey in physical space, first of all, then an itinerary in our mind: thus reversing the myth of Ulysses, the tireless traveler who manages to cross the Pillars of Hercules, who has accompanied us for over two thousand years as a metaphor for an interminable journey into knowledge.
The space of the Tuareg and the Bedouins is essentially the desert, which for us is a succession of sandy patches, rocky islets, promontories, ridges, dunes, flat horizons that seem to never be reached.
We are struck by these forms, by these arcane presences that follow one another and seem to prelude something new and different, but which in reality do nothing but repeat themselves, always the same.
For the sedentary traveller, the desert represents monotony, emptiness, absence better than anything else; for nomads, however, everything in the desert is a sign and reference.
So that these peoples, with their ability to reinvent everything every time anew, can perhaps show us a way to combat the disillusionment and disbelief of our time, and with their habit of emptiness, the absence of a fixed space that makes them continually available for adventure, for risk, distance us from any form of tiredness.
We have marked the space of the nomads wanting to underline that our conquest of a fluid knowledge still lacks the equally important physical ability to abandon our habits, and therefore, our certainties.
Why then "space" nomads?
What do we know most like the desert of interstellar space?
Perhaps in the millennium of interplanetary travel, nomads will be able to teach us to transform a void into a fullness simply by crossing it.
(from "Uqbar Notes for the Next Millennium", n. 1, April 1998)