Maps of the Invisible

And again, we ignore an intermediate period and leap straight into the present of 20... Nana is on the move once more. It goes without saying that the man addressed is not the same as his predecessor. He appears, once again, nameless.

Did it make sense, this path we followed? Did we follow a line not chosen by us, but remembered? Did the land call to us? Was our route, in truth, a resonance space carrying personal messages?

Was this ingenuity reckless? What did we really know? "Dreaming – Dreamtime" reduced the concept to a Western notion of dreams, interiority, and fiction. The interpretation ignored an ontological framework in which creation, land, identity, and action are intertwined. I was fascinated by this cosmology. A complete, non-technical system of meaning, in which a way of life is reflected—one that had been in constant practice for 300,000 years. I do not intend to start talking about Stone Age high tech. For me, it also represented an invitation to perceive other ways of being—less individualistic, more embedded, connected with place, time, and ancestors. It contrasted sharply with Western ideas of autonomy, progress, and separateness. Perhaps therein lies the value of approaching Dreaming with respect and openness—not to appropriate it, but to learn that our world can be imagined differently.

Once, I had tried to read Sigmund Freud in an original way, to understand him as someone who created a European-urban variant of Dreaming—albeit anchored in his own manner, deeply rooted in rationality and individual psychology. The Dreaming (in the culture of the Aboriginal people) is collective, mythical, timeless, cyclical, tied to landscape and identity. It tells how the world came into being, what connections exist between humans, places, animals, and laws. Freud's dream interpretation, by contrast, is individual, psychological, linear, inward-directed, and symbolic—but even it is a cartography of the invisible, an interpretation of meaning, woven with narrative structures and symbolic figures that speak from an "other" consciousness. Both systems—Dreaming and Freud's theory of the unconscious—attempt to make understandable the hidden forces that structure visible life. Both recognize in dreams a mediated, deeper truth. Both employ narrative, image, and symbolism to translate the invisible. And both ultimately function as meaning-making machines—with ethical, social, or healing purposes.

Freud "internalized" the myths: he sought them within the subject. This is the great shift from mythical cosmology to the modern Western interior. The Eurocentric perspective—Sigmund Freud, who in his work drew on archaic myths and "primitive" cultures—mostly interpreted them as projection screens for Western soul conflicts, without grasping their own logic. His construction of the psyche is deeply embedded in the cultural self-image of the West. The "primeval horde," the "primitive self," the fantasies of wildness—all followed a structure in the mind of the industrial age, at whose end the European bourgeois man stood as an implicit ideal. Freud wrote about "savages" without ever meeting them—they were conceptual figures, useful foils.

Claude Lévi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques is regarded as a milestone of ethnology, but it is simultaneously an expression of a melancholic, almost aestheticized experience of the foreign, measuring the self against difference and ultimately turning the "Other" into a reflection of European crises. And André Malraux, who wandered through Cambodia with a colonial gesture, treating temple reliefs as trophies. Ruthlessly, he raided the realm of the Khmer Rouge. Before his brilliant period as a writer and cultural minister, he was a plunderer—guided by the conviction that great artworks had to be "saved," even if removed from their context. In 1923, he had temple reliefs removed from Banteay Srei—ornate Apsara figures carved in pink sandstone. He was arrested and sentenced, but soon released. Later he stylized himself as a defender of culture against oblivion. White arrogance remained untouched.

Malraux was no exception. Entire Western museums rest on this gesture: the belief that cultivated admiration legitimizes claims—because one knows how to appreciate. The colonial gaze disguises itself. Even today, acts of appropriation bear the signature of transgression: we give you meaning by taking it from you.