Technologies of Drawing (On) a Desert: Reading Land Art and Colonial Politics in the Naqab/Negev Diffractively

Abstract

Experimenting with a new materialist diffractive approach, this article offers an insight into the agential capacities of lines by juxtaposing two apparently unrelated cases of large-scale drawing practices: the aesthetic process involved in an event of artistic creation and the scientific process of visual representation of data-supported meteorological measurements. The article makes use of the analysis of Jim Denevan’s land art as a tool with which to approach cartography-based colonial politics in the Naqab/Negev Desert (Israel). Such an unusual methodological strategy assists in exposing how political decisions based on the system of scientific classification of land have contributed to the substantial reconfiguration of settlement patterns in the region, negatively affecting the life of a significant number of Bedouin Arabs, indigenous to this land. By investigating the possibly harmful, highly politicised potentials of cartographic endeavours while uncovering their material-semiotic contingency, the article reveals how the enterprise of mapping space can benefit colonialism and discriminatory politics. The aim is to offer a cultural studies understanding of the problematic political and environmental developments taking place in the Naqab/Negev, explaining how the science-based politics of drawing has been mobilised for the purpose of colonial policy, translating into the discriminatory treatment of the indigenous population while extrapolating spatial injustices in the region.