“We arrived in a strange new place with nothing but the clothes on our backs, not knowing how long we would stay there… it was an escape, a matter of life and death and finding somewhere to stay for the time being, until we could return home… and suddenly, it hardly seems possible, but more than 40 years have gone by.”
At this moment, the number of displaced people in the world has reached over 45 million.War is one of the main reasons for this figure; exile is possibly the only solution these people have to save their lives, moving to another, neutral land, safe yet also different from their own.The mobilisation of thousands of people, the adjustment to a new environment, temporary buildings, the combination of human beings, nature, time and space… make refugee camps highly intense places.Portraying these new landscapes of exile, capturing the harshness of the climate and the rough environment, as well as showing the grandeur but also the cruelty of nature that defines these “imaginary countries”; this, together with the ability of the people to adapt to their new “home” and accept that life goes on, is the reason why I work on these new and growing settlements.In 2005 I started the project Tindouf, Paysages d´un exile, which set out to be a meditation on the camps of Saharawi people in the Algerian Hamada, in the middle of the Sahara Desert, where the displaced arrived after Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara in 1975.
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