Thinking the desert allows us to see “the territory from the
south”. However, such a position should not be understood
as a geographical location but as a perspective, as an optic,
through which “placeing ourselves” in the ontologies of the
fragility of meridian spatial practices peculiar to places
culturally and politically interwoven with heavy colonial
legacies, marked by forms of racial capitalism, aggressive
phenomena of extractivism, and heavy imperial processes
of infrastructuring. The desert is what philosopher AnneFrançoise Schmid would call an “integrative object”, a
multi-dimensional object that allows the contrast between
protection and exposure, between belonging and exclusion,
to be made explicit. The control and manipulation of the
desert, despite appearing as the unproductive space par excellence, requires submission to extreme surveillance, to an
intense biopolitical control that manifests itself in painful
forms. Starting from the confrontation with such themes,
these reflections, recalling authors and studies with a decolonial matrix reflects on the importance and the need to
think about and confront the desert understood as a stratigraphy in which histories of oppression and liberation are
interwoven and one in which apocalyptic or utopian prefigurations about the future of the planet are produced. To think from the deserts means, perhaps, to propose an epistemological disobedience and thus to configure a space of
critique.
