My name is Federico Guzmán and I am a visual artist from Seville, Spain. I have been working in Western Sahara since 2008, when my collaboration began with ARTifariti: the International Meetings of Arts and Human Rights of Western Sahara that are held on a yearly basis, organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), in colaboration with the Asociation of Friendship with the Sahrawi People of Seville (AAPSS), in the Saharawi refugee camps of Tindouf, Algeria, and in the Free Territories of Western Sahara.

Sahrawi artists

Thousands of people have been living for forty-three years in refugee camps in Algeria. They are still opposing Morocco’s brutal and ilegal occupation of their country through peaceful resistance. Some people use protest as their weapon. Some use words, and others use art. I have known and collaborated with Sahrawi artists for ten years now and would like to share some personal perceptions on my friends.

Sahrawi artists paint political paintings, which are epic and daily; their poems are manifestos of uncertainty, protest and hope; their music is vindictive, combative and inspiring; and cinema is committed to the revolutionary effort of their people. Their art is the intifada (nonviolent protest) of a transformative new way in their community. I observe in them an urgency, a crudity and an immediacy so powerful that they can sometimes destabilize our sophisticated Western gaze. The Sahrawi artists do not protest for their copyrights, they do not do their work to be printed in catalogs, nor selfies for social networks. Although we can do postmodern, deconstructive or post-structuralist analyzes of their work, this work is, above all, an indispensable insurgent, deautomating, decolonial, collective and healing tool of psycho-aesthetic, communicational and socio-expressive development. It is the cry of the uprising of an entire people, in a nonviolent struggle for their dignity as individuals and as a community, for their land, their roots and their freedom.

Many of them had not thought of being artists, but instead of grabbing a rifle, they have taken a brush with paint, and have seen that they can, instead of spilling blood, smear the world with colors, messages and symbols. Every Sahrawi is an artist when she discovers within herself a light that allows her to transcend her condition of a refugee, and to recognize herself as a co-creator, capable of transforming reality, giving meaning to her life by drawing the collective maktuba (destiny).

Mohamed Slaiman

I was invited by María Carrión to write about my friend, the young artist Mohamed Slaiman. In preparation of this text I collected as much information as possible about his work, including my notes of conversations. I took a lot of the visual and textual material from Mohamed’s Facebook page.

Mohamed has become an iconic figure in the camps, utilizing the tools that art offers as a vehicle to promote social change. Combining abstraction and recycling, vision and intention, Suleiman treads between a maker, an artist and an inspirer of his community, emphasizing workshops and co-creative work that will induce exchange of ideas and collaborations between artists and the local Sahrawi community. In any given day you can find Mohamed collecting and recycling wood, cloth, cardboard, plastics and metals found in the refugee camps to create his own works: “I want to find practical solutions that help my people, but also artistic ones”.

“I have been playing with art and painting since childhood, but I’ve never had a formal academic art education. I studied English literature and also calligraphy in Algeria. However, I have always felt an impulse towards art.” That artistic call had a turning point after the catastrophic floods that the camps suffered in 2015. He recalls: “I had a room with my books, my art, where I met with my friends. But that room was devastated by the rain. It was a moment of crucial change in my life because I lost part of my work and very good books. So, in that moment, I decided that I was going to create a new space where I could create art, share, learn and interact with other people. Basically, the idea came as a reaction to that loss.”

Slaiman built his atelier with his own hands and from the ground up, recycling materials, making the design, the construction technique and the visual elements an artwork in itself. For Mohamed, building his own studio allowed him to know each material and how it behaves. “My training as an artist is the result of this process of building my own studio, because I had to solve problems and find solutions. That has taken away my fear to face any challenge and has made it clear to me that there is always a solution for everything: it can take me more or less time, effort and energy, but in the end I find it. I share these solutions with others and my intention is that they can be applied in the camps.” Therefore, his first great work is his own artist atelier, which he has called Motif Art Studio & Workshop: “I have made of my life a laboratory to experiment and play with things. I’m an experimenter and what I do is check what works and what does not.”

The artist at Motif Art Studio, built with his own hands, recycling elements from the garbage.

Mohamed highlights an example related to the fact that during the summer the thermometers reach more than 50 degrees Celsius in the Sahrawi refugee camps and that many adobe houses become authentic furnaces. “The heat is unbearable at this time of year and many Sahrawi homes have zinc plank roofs, a superconductor of heat, which increases the temperatura and the discomfort. The solution to get some relief I found in the milk cartons. I realized that they are formed by four layers of different materials – cardboard, aluminum and two layers of plastic– that maintain the temperature. This I applied to the ceiling and the walls of my studio, creating panels with six or seven layers of wood, fabric, plastic and cardboard. It is a very effective system to prevent heat from penetrating the walls and to maintain a constant and pleasant temperature. I have found that it is very effective for both heat and cold. I can assure you that it feels better in my studio than in any of the tents or adobe houses.”

Another example Sleiman highlights refers to the air currents: “In the camps, all the windows open horizontally, so they always let the sun in, but if you build them to open vertically, they let in the air and, In addition, they can protect from the sun. It is also essential that you place the windows at different heights to allow the circulation of air and not create a dense atmosphere.”

In addition to his own studio, one of the projects that has revolutionized the landscape of the camps is his set of murals. Six of them, so far. Often with the collaboration with children, and in the context of workshops with foreign artists and visitors (NGOs), Mohamed Slaiman has illuminated the ochre palette of the refuge landscape with bright colors that brighten the everyday.

“In my house I painted one with references to abstract art; another is in one of the walls of the home of my friend Salek and his family, and it recalls the tea ceremony as a signifyer of hospitality; the third –of an intense blue color– stands out among both the ochre and yellow of the desert, and it invites you to think of a scarce resource like water. This one is in the Bubisher public library; the fourth, called The Tube, I painted on the walls of the Integration Center for People with Physical and Psychic Disabilities of Buyema Fateh; and the last one was a tribute to a neighbor in his own home.”

In this environment of scarcity and survival, Sleiman understands that not all Sahrawis understand his innovative kind of art, but he does hope that he will help his compatriots to open their minds. In this sense, he affirms: “some people think that I am a little crazy, and they ask me why I do these things and what they are for. I answer that art can connect people, open minds, solve problems and serve as a healing energy for the community. I try to make people understand that art is something more than what we see at first glance. If we work on thinking about different things, we can apply it to any aspect of our lives as refugees.”

In fact, his proposals are so novel that he has received criticism because some do not consider his works to be an example of Sahrawi art. Mohamed responds: “What is Sahrawi art? Is it what it has been in the past, in a specific period and in a specific place? Works that each Sahrawi does? People think of traditional art, but the Sahrawi identity is not fixed because it is made up of multiple things, not just a few that refer to a specific period. In fact, neither I nor many of the refugees have ever been in occupied Western Sahara, but we feel that our identity and that the land are ours. It is good and healthy to know and question the norm and, often, also to break it. I respect traditional art and I love it, but do not exclude myself because I do something different. I am a Sahrawi and I do art, therefore, my art is Sahrawi. In the end, art is a human expression that reflects what you are, think and feel.”