Sahara Occidental: Africa’s last colony

Whether 50-year-old film reels, an UN soap, a tea set to taste death or charcoal drawings by an artist from Graz, the visits to the Saharawi refugee camps have produced objects of memory. At the edges of the EU, the contradiction and the lie about this “community of values”, which always subordinates the small under the large, the other always under the same, can be seen.

And yet the desert is alive.

A classic conflict on the international stage, with the UN, the EU and Africa as co-players, is also reflected in the individual objects that have manifested themselves in the context of many visits and projects. Talking about such a conflict, which, as usual in such conflicts, fundamentally distorts, disrupts and destroys the reality of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, is then increasingly accompanied by the murmur and clatter, the waving and whirring of these objects. Just as the speaker confronts this conflict, the objects of his memory confront him. In Morocco’s colonialism, which has fallen out of historiography, these objects of memory become collector’s items, the travel experiences become ethnographies and the encounters become extended family. A state and a society that has existed in refugee camps for almost 50 years has a particular tension between symbolization and realization. This exhibition also lies between symbols and realities.

An exposition by RHIZOM