![]() ![]() Westerners – such as the galleries that commissioned this film – are seldom allowed to enter. Close to the Libyan border, it remains an unmanaged territory. The region in which Tassili n’Ajjer lies is politically and physically virtually inaccessible. Yet there are hidden stories behind Ourahmane’s film. Scored by four musicians, it turns the caves into a sensational experience for us to ingest from afar, itself a sort of trip. Her video work Tassili (2022) takes us deep into its crags and caverns. Early this year, the Algerian artist Lydia Ourahmane travelled to the park with a band of collaborators. They feature humans, demons, ostriches, antelopes and, in possibly the first known depiction of a psychedelic ritual, a bee-headed shaman whose body appears to be sprouting mushrooms. Tassili n’Ajjer, a national park in south-eastern Algeria, is home to rock paintings and engravings dating back thousands of years. 4K video, 16 mm transferred to video, digital animation, sound, 47:41 min. Lydia Ourahmane, Tassili, 2022, video still. They also warned against a repeat at Altamira of the kind of damage by black mold to the paintings at Lascaux, which was caused by their mismanagement.Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & the Subterranean Imaginary Nottingham Contemporary takes a richly rewarding descent into the art of the underground: a place for ritual, transformation and storage depots The researchers at Altamira Cave concluded that while reopening the cave to tourists might help the local economy in the short term, the importance of the paintings and their preservation should take precedence. ![]() The 14,000 years old Paleolithic rock art examples at Altamira and those in the Lascaux caves in Dordogne, France, are among the best preserved in Europe. The study also identified other items tourists would bring with them, and which would also encourage bacterial and fungal growth, including dust, flakes of skin, and clothing fibers. They found that the presence of large numbers of people would introduce light, increase the temperature and humidity, raise CO2 levels, increase air turbulence, and in short, create perfect conditions for the bacteria and fungi to multiply and resume their destruction of the paintings. In the new study, published in the journal Science, Saiz-Jimenez and colleagues modeled the effects of allowing the public back into the cave. The 2010 proposal to reopen the cave was dependent on expert opinion of how many visitors should be allowed in the cave. It was closed in 1977 over concerns for the paintings, but reopened in 1982 but annual tourist numbers were restricted to 8,500. When the cave was open large numbers of tourists visited (reaching as many as 174,000 in the 1970s). In 2010 government authorities proposed the cave be reopened to the public to attract tourists and provide a much-needed boost to the local economy. Among the best known of the paintings are those discovered in 1879 of bison, deer and horses, in the Polychromes Hall near the entrance to the cave.Īltamira Cave was closed to tourists in 2002, after Claudia Schabereiter-Gurtner, Saiz-Jimenez, and colleagues first reported that bacteria and fungi were colonizing the paintings and consuming the pigments, which meant they would adversely affect the conservation of the paintings. Professor Cesareo Saiz-Jimenez of the Institute for Natural Resources and Agrobiology, at the Spanish National Research Council (IRNAS-CSIC), and colleagues have warned that reopening the cave could lead to permanent damage to the paintings. ![]()
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