long time to coordinate and an even longer time to reach in a jeep convoy splayed out horizontally across the desert. When we arrived, Khadija Hamdi, the Minister of Culture told us that we were going to celebrate A Day of Sahrawi Culture, an event that she had reconstructed from the vast unwritten tomes of her people’s oral histories. In the middle of the desert, under a blazing sun, we experienced how the customs, traditions and rituals have been past time down since the beginning. Tuesday - October 23rd Like all our mornings, the everyday became a sort of dance in which the daily logistics were magically solved with some joy: organizing the process of bathing, preparing breakfast, procuring transportation for field trips. Our greatest mission was the coordinating the projects of more than 60 artists from 14 different countries in ten days. This entailed meeting all of their logistical needs (human, material, transportation, technology, etc..) and locating all of the equipment necessary to document every artwork as it was being made and once it was completed As the afternoon turned into evening, we had successfully inaugurated the Sixth Edition of The International Meetings of
167
Art and Human Rights in Western Sahara. The Sahrawi Minister of Culture thanked all to the international artists participating in ARTifariti 2012 by saying that “they, the artists, can be the voice of Sahrawi people outside of the camps.” Then each of the artists presented their proposals. Together they formed a mosaic of different ways of representing, understanding and creating art about the Sahara conflict. We all took turns talking and patiently listening as each project was translated into the three “official” languages: Hassania, Spanish and English, in even sometimes French. The cycling of words musically meshed with the special rhythms of the Sahara. Wednesday - October 24th The specifics of each artist’s project require the coordination of an array of special requests and difficult logistics. But now everything seems calm again as everyone assumes their given mission for the day. The Algerian project requires that they work in teams to create a series of large totems dedicated to Liberty, Independence and Humanity. Their whole area resounds with the whirr of circular saws cutting into sheet metal and to the cacophony of circular saws.
It is essential that we visit some key locations. We must drive to The Association of Victims of Landmines, ASAVIM, chaired by the cousin of the activist Aminatou Haidar where we bear witness to their amazing program. The judge who works with this team shows us how in just six months they had helped more than 6000 landmine victims find micro financing for their own businesses. We used what we learned at the Association to support a project titled Mines Hurt by the US artist Thasa Doremus, who had spent years working with the scar as an artistic narrative. Here, she approached the idea of collaborating with landmine victims to create portraits that both photographically and conceptually reflected the scars that they carry as a part of their everyday identity. Thursday - October 25th This morning is seasoned with the excitement of a coming celebration, the Feast of the Lamb. As everyone prepares to celebrate with their families, we make a trip to AFAPREDESA, the Association of Families of Sahrawi Prisoners and Disappeared. It is one of the most active associations in the camps and the soul of the Artifariti project Design Sentas (DS). DS is a project that brings together Artifariti draughtspersons with families of missing relatives
so that the artist can reconstruct through their loved ones words and memories, a portrait of the disappeared. This action is often a catharsis for the families who experience their emotions and feelings in a state of distress, not knowing “where to place their pain,” because they do not know if their relative is dead, incarcerated, or is suffering ... The state of emotional limbo can find a refuge after actions like this in an environment that recreates around the image of the missing person a representation of what lingers in the memories of those who remember him. Finally the families choose one of the portraits and keep it. Some children have only seen their parents through these portraits. Friday - October 26th For the Feast of the Lamb all daily routines come to a stop. Families get together, women go out to the square, they make up and wear their best melhfas, paint their hands and feet with henna and celebrate the slaughter of a lamb with the whole family. By noon, all of the homes had readied their lambs. The men in the families were responsible for killing it, meanwhile, the women cleaned and showed us how healthy the lamb we would eat was, because those lambs, did not eat plastic, such as the other ones that we saw every day
in the camp. Our lamb designated for the meal was grass fed in some place far away. For us, it was also a gift to spend from afternoon until sunset on a mountain, and view the vastness of the desert from a distance in order to marvel at man’s ability to survive there. Saturday - October 27th The Meetings proceeded: actions and performance by the national award Esther Ferrer were carried out by Spanish and Algerian students, and these exercises made us think of the shared understanding between different groups. Later we experienced in awe the reception at the “Tuizza” jaima of activists from the occupied territories. They narrated with great drama the terror-filled situation of living in the occupied El Aaiún. And Jose, who comes year after year to the Sahara and is the adoptive father of a Sahrawi youngster, gifted the activists with a plan to dream, but also a plan of action: Jose deployed a large map of El Aaiún on which the activists wrote down their own names on each of the streets where they live in order to retrieve the identity of their territories in action-simulation. Later on the group Raiz Microphone gave the activists micro devices that allowed them to filter sound and visual information from the occupied territories
that they would not otherwise be able to see. All of these activities had an overwhelming effect on everybody. We all agreed that the brutality of the Saharwis life needed to be seen. We discussed strategies for opening up the this dialogue through art, political action and the construction of an image. Sunday - October 28th That morning we went to the Documentation Center, which resulted in a much richer experience than expected. The center had made a great effort to collect all of the ephemera, and the oral and visual documentation possible about Saharawi identity. Although, the task would be easy in our society, it is really amazing considering that the Sahrawi culture is a nomadic society based in oral tradition; one that is detached from material things. This center was doing very important work, legitimizing their existence as a State to Western Countries. Step by step we started to understand how different their reality is from the one we live. That afternoon we watched the the highly expressive performance “33 minutes” by Los Torreznos. There were people there who spoke 16 languages and there were and eternal translations into 4 languages that were spoken day by day, it was the first
168