Transhumance in Translation was a long-term, process-based collaboration between artist Amanda Camenisch and members of the Kel Tamasheq nomadic communities of the Sahara, including Keltoum Walet, Souleymane Ag Anara, Walid Le Berber, Mohamed Aguissa, Fatima Al Ansary, Mouhmoud Mouta, Moha Ed Daoudy, and Diana Sididi. 

The project investigated how movement—understood as a social, ecological, and performative process—shapes systems of knowledge, governance, and healing. Emerging from extended fieldwork, artistic exchange, and collaborative production, the work situates nomadism as both a lived practice and a methodology for thinking about translation, performance, and continuity.

Drawing on Kel Tamasheq musical and dance traditions, Transhumance in Translation considers performance as a key mode through which community, identity, and political agency are articulated. Musical-dance events within Kel Tamasheq culture operate simultaneously as aesthetic, social, and regulatory systems: they are sites where histories are remembered, social norms negotiated, and collective emotions processed. Through repetition, improvisation, and the circulation of poetic language, performance becomes a form of governance grounded in participation and affect rather than hierarchy.

The project connects this understanding of embodied practice to the broader notion of transhumance—the cyclical migration of herders and their livestock following the seasonal availability of resources. Here, movement is not interpreted as displacement but as a structuring rhythm that sustains both ecological balance and social cohesion. Transhumance functions as a framework for knowledge transmission: a mobile archive where song, gesture, and memory are continuously reactivated.

In its visual and performative components, the project moves between film, sound, photography, and live practice, positioning each medium as part of a larger system of relational translation. The act of translating—between languages, media, or modes of perception—is approached not as a transfer of fixed meaning but as an ongoing negotiation that transforms all parties involved. This reflects a broader inquiry into how artistic methodologies might embody mobility and reciprocity, rather than representation or extraction.

Out of this process grew the Ahanay Collective, a group of young Tuareg photographers, filmmakers, and journalists whose work seeks to articulate local perspectives on culture, environment, and change. Their Media Tent, inspired by nomadic architectural structures, functions as a mobile newsroom and studio, a site for recording and reinterpreting community narratives. It operates as both artwork and infrastructure, enabling local authorship and collaborative exchange across geographies.

Transhumance in Translation thus positions artistic practice as a medium for rethinking how knowledge circulates—across bodies, landscapes, and generations. It addresses how ancient forms of mobility adapt to political and ecological disruptions, and how performative acts of remembrance and renewal continue to generate forms of resilience. Rather than treating nomadism as an aesthetic metaphor, the project engages it as a living epistemology: one that challenges static notions of territory, authorship, and culture.

Ultimately, the project proposes movement—both physical and conceptual—as a condition for learning and relation. It situates art not as representation but as a practice of transmission in motion: an evolving dialogue between people, places, and the forces that bind them.

This project emerged from a wider research inquiry into musical and dance performance as a form of governance and healing within Kel Tamasheq communities. To learn more about this research, click here.