Vandromme’s “On Their Way” is an intriguing piece of art illustrating the relationship between humans and non-human entities. Installed outside the National Museum of Qatar, it portrays four Arabian camels sculpted out of bronze – two at the back and two at the front in a walking position. The positioning and walking motion is representative of Qatar’s past, present, and future state. It symbolises how the relationship between humans and non-human species has altered over the decades as a result of the swift shift in Qatar’s economic as well as societal state.
Camels are a non-human entity that have always been an integral part of Qatar’s customs and traditions. Qatar’s feudal and nomadic period not so long ago was a time where humans were heavily reliant on nature and its species such as camels, for reasons such as travelling. Therefore, Vandromme’s sculpture is the ideal embodiment of representing the human and non-human relationship in Qatari tradition and its alteration over the years.I would like to portray this sculpture in two differing spotlights. The first one being the human relationship with camels as previously mentioned, and the second being the absence of human life in the sculpture, suggesting a different stance altogether. Thus to demonstrate these two ideas, I would like to incorporate the article “How Forests Think” by Eduardo Kohn into this argument.
Kohn in his article presents the argument of human exceptionalism from an anthropological perspective, contending that human and non-human species lie on the same grounds albeit the human tendency to view ourselves as a superior identity in many aspects. Kohn argues that it is crucial “to practise an anthropology that does not radically separate humans from nonhumans” (Kohn 9), and in his article he presents the Ruma people coexisting with the forest, just like how nomadic Qataris existed with camels, hence establishing a common foundation for both the human and non-human entities. Incorporating Vandromme’s artwork into this argument, the human-camel relation in Qatari culture can be contended to have changed due to the lifestyle of the Qatari people. The rapid economic development also saw the social development of Qataris, hence their lifestyles shifted from nomadic to modern, meaning that they did not need camels in their lifestyles anymore. Hence, here it can be argued that the human-nonhuman relationship was corrupt from the human side because the camels were taken advantage of until they had nothing to offer the humans. They were left forgotten in the desert after the people moved onto their lavish lifestyles.
By the same token, the absence of humans from the artwork further reinforces this notion that the camels were left in the past with the nomadic lifestyle, and were not incorporated into the present lifestyles of the humans. This point however can be contended in the sense that Qatar still attempts to keep its cultural values and traditions alive, and non-human entities such as camels play a pivotal role in that. The depiction of the sculpture, as previously mentioned, is one of Qatar’s past, present and future. But the question that arises here is that are the non-human entities really incorporated into the present state of Qatar?
References:
Kohn, Eduardo. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Univ of California Press, 2013.
Vandromme, Roch. “On their way (2013) at National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ) Architect Jean Nouvel”. Roch Vandromme. October 12, 2022, https://roch-vandromme.com/musee-national-du-qatar/?lang=en.
