Arts and Culture in Global Development Practice

Expression, Identity and Empowerment

Cindy Maguire, Ann Holt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000548907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

This book explores the role that arts and culture can play in supporting global international development.

The book argues that arts and culture are fundamental to human development and can bring considerable positive results for helping to empower communities and provide new ways of looking at social transformation. Whilst most literature addresses culture in abstract terms, this book focuses on practice-based, collective, community-focused, sustainability-minded, and capacity-building examples of arts and development. The book draws on case studies from around the world, investigating the different ways practitioners are imagining or defining the role of arts and culture in Belize, Canada, China, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kosovo, Malawi, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, the USA, and Western Sahara refugee camps in Algeria. The book highlights the importance of situated practice, asking what questions or concerns practitioners have and inviting a dialogic sharing of resources and possibilities across different contexts.

Seeking to highlight practices and conversations outside normative frameworks of understanding, this book will be a breath of fresh air to practitioners, policy makers, students, and researchers from across the fields of global development, social work, art therapy, and visual and performing arts education.

1 A temple of art in the middle of the desertReflections on creating Motif Art Studio and the role of art in the Sahrawi refugee camps

Mohamed Sleiman Labat

DOI: 10.4324/9781003148203-2

Melting away

It hardly rains in this part of the world. Some call this area the desert within the desert. It is October 2015. The rain has not stopped for seven days and nights in all the five camps located in the Hamada Desert (Lecat, 2016). Very quickly, small water streams start to run down the solid desert grounds. Before we realize it, water is flooding through our tent and soaking our belongings. Outside the tent, water has slowly encroached and eroded the floor of our room; it is a mud room that my brothers and I built together a few years ago. The mud room cannot resist the erosion and falls down within 15 minutes. The room is my family’s living room, my library, my workshop, and our guests’ room (Berkson & Sulaiman, 2015). Now my books are under the rubble, soaked in mud, along with my sewing machine and my artworks.

A few hours later, the family gathers in the tent on a small dry island between the two bamboo sticks supporting the tent. My father is telling stories from his childhood as a nomad in Western Sahara. He tells us about huge roaring floods uprooting trees, dragging camels, and blocking the cattle for long weeks and months.¹ My parents have lived as nomads in different parts of Western Sahara, just like the rest of the Sahrawi.

The next morning the rain stops. There is a lot of damage: mud walls crumbling, broken furnishings everywhere, and clothes and blankets hanging to dry on the ropes of tents. It’s an overwhelming scene, and I can feel the loss in every corner I pass.

Troubled past

I am a Sahrawi artist, born and raised in the Sahrawi refugee camps set up in a part of the Algerian south called the Hamada Desert. I live and work in Samara Camp. The journey of my people started in Western Sahara, located in the north-west part of Africa, facing the Canary Islands. It’s now a conflict zone that is rarely talked about in the news.

Formerly known as Spanish Sahara during the Spanish colonization, Western Sahara is now widely referred to as Africa’s Last Colony (Martín, 2017). In November 1975, Morocco invaded the territory. A war of resistance led by the Frente POLISARIO broke out and only ended after the UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991.² Many Sahrawi communities sought refuge in Algeria where they established five refugee camps near the border town of Tindouf. These camps consist of basic infrastructure of fabric tents and hand-built mud houses. The tents symbolize the temporality of the situation as well as a connection to the Sahrawi’s past nomadism (San Martín, 2010). The Sahrawi have also built schools, local hospitals, and other administrative facilities.

The desert environment where the Sahrawi have settled is extreme and unforgiving. The temperature can reach up to 50 degrees Celsius.³ It’s different from the slightly moistened Western Sahara Desert where the Sahrawi originally come from. Here, there is not enough water, and the camp population is dependent on international aid. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are 173,000 people living in the five main camps of Samara, Layoun, Dakhla, Auserd, and Boujdour.⁴ The camps are named after cities and places back in Western Sahara in order to maintain cultural connections with our homeland. It’s in one of these camps, Dakhla Camp, where I was born, literally in a fabric tent, one cold February night in 1986—as my mom recalls.

Figure 1.1 Samara Camp. Photograph by Mohamed Sleiman Labat/Motif Art Studio

For centuries, the Sahrawi have been the nomadic indigenous people of Western Sahara (Omar, 2008). They raised camels and goats and moved with their tents and cattle across the different parts of the desert. The Sahrawi speak Hassaniya, an oral dialect from Arabic and Amazigh languages. Hassaniya is largely spoken in Western Sahara and Mauritania, the south of Morocco, and some parts of Algeria, Mali, and Senegal (Zbeir, 2013).

I write this chapter to share reflections on creating Motif Art Studio, a small hub for art creation and experimentation as well as international collaborations in Samara Camp. I highlight some of the individual and collaborative projects in the studio and the role of art in the Sahrawi refugee camps. I then share insights about the past, present, and future complexities of the Sahrawi traditions and my response through art and archiving oral traditions to raise questions of how we can relate to our past in order to face the present and future.

How it all began

My father, Sulaiman Labat Abd, is a self-taught artist who taught me the basics of calligraphy, crafts, and a love for oral wisdom and desert stories. My grandmother, Akhyarhom Limam, was a poetess. Both of them lived much of their lives as nomads in Western Sahara before they ended up refugees in Algeria. I grew up listening to their poems and stories and using my hands to play with things. At the age of 11, I had to leave the camps to continue my studies in different Algerian cities. As there are no high schools in the camps, all the Sahrawi youth go abroad to study before coming back home. After graduation from Batna University, I returned to the camps. I wanted to help support my family and my community. But I didn’t know how.

In the first few years, I worked as a translator in the camps. In 2010, I was invited to take part in ARTifariti (www.artifariti.org/en/about-artifariti), the International Encounters of Arts and Human Rights of Western Sahara, held in Tifariti, Western Sahara. ARTifariti is an international appointment with artistic practices as a tool to vindicate human rights—the right of the people to their land, their culture, their roots, and their freedom. ARTifariti is about establishing connections through art practice as an annual encounter of public art to reflect on art creation and society. The premise of the encounter is that “in order to understand each other, we have to meet each other. In order to meet, we have to find each other” (ARTifariti, 2021, About ARTifariti, The encounters, para 1). This dialogical way of doing and making art—in conversation with other artists and communities—makes a point of contact for artists interested in the capacity of art to question and transform reality. It promotes intercultural relations, interchange of experiences and skills between Sahrawi artists and artists from other parts of the world.

The experience during ARTifariti also helped me build up my artistic skills as well as affording me the opportunity to engage in meaningful exchanges with other artists. I participated as an artist and made a calligraphy mural rendered into music-like notes. La Voce Libre (The Free Voice) can penetrate the walls of silence and break through isolating situations.⁵ I engaged in conversations and discussions taking place across the festival. Being able to speak English helped facilitate the communication process with the international visiting artists; however, translation is a mentally demanding job and, ultimately, not fulfilling for me. Tired of doing things that were not mentally and spiritually fulfilling, I had to pause for some time (A few weeks of doing nothing!) and rethink everything. I asked myself deep questions about who I am and what I wanted to do with my life. I found myself listening to my inner voice: my passion is to create, to play with things as I once used to do. I knew then that I had to go back to the child in me. I had to become an artist.

Starting from scratch

During the floods of 2015, many of the fragile mud houses were destroyed.⁶ It was after the loss of my own home that the idea to establish a proper space for art in Samara refugee camp started to take shape. During my bike trips around the camp, after the flood, I saw a lot of discarded objects in their current status: dirty, broken, and forgotten by the world.⁷ At the same time, I started to see potential in the broken materials left over from the flood.

I began to develop new habits and tendencies, always getting excited when I saw something on the ground. I’m particularly interested in experimentation, which has become part of my art practice. I began to deliberately put myself into situations of creative limitedness and attune to my reactions and how the process and stories would unfold. All the broken wood and metal parts suddenly started to become valuable. Something was changing: what was trash and with no value was suddenly becoming the center of my attention, and I began deliberately searching for it. I began rethinking the value of objects around me. Even in conversations with my family, I named my new-found objects raw materials as their new journey was about to start.

In these moments, I know I am about to witness the beginning of a journey of transformation. Upon such an encounter, I often ask questions like: where did these objects come from? Who made them? How did they end up here? These are not simply questions about the objects’ history; these questions bring up the relations we lost with objects and the relations we establish with them. The moment I decide to pick up an object and bring it to the studio, its course of life changes, and so does its history and value. I often spend some time just looking at it, turning it around in my hands before I start tweaking and changing it into something else. The journey of object transformation could start anywhere. The object’s character also undergoes big changes from an object of no value that goes through processes to become something else, aesthetic or functional.

To a great extent, this journey of transformation is a metaphor about my personal life and the situation in the camps. How I picked myself up from the dirt and transformed myself into something else—an artist. Motif Art Studio was born.

Figure 1.2 The building process. Photograph by Mohamed Sleiman Labat/Motif Art Studio

The beginning was very difficult as I did not have funding to build the studio. I had to start from scratch. I resorted to the discarded materials and garbage in my surroundings in order to build the physical space. I began to collect car parts and scraps of wood and other materials. A slow process of upcycling, recycling, and transformation began. The reclaimed materials were used to make different parts of the building as well as to make tools and furniture for the studio. The whole process of the construction took one full year, from April 2016 until April 2017. During the 12-month period, I did nothing else; the main task and goal for me was to establish Motif Art Studio. I took my time to accomplish the task, bearing in mind the many aspects of the experience, learning, exploring, and problem-solving as I go.

The studio is 6 × 6 meters and 3 meters high. It’s built almost entirely from discarded materials. The main structure is made from reclaimed wood beams and corrugated zinc. The studio area includes the stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bringing forth human expression, forming identity, and empowering communities through arts and culture: Who defines it? Who is it for? Who gets to do it?
• 1 A temple of art in the middle of the desert: Reflections on creating Motif Art Studio and the role of art in the Sahrawi refugee camps
• 2 A Painted Conversation: Narratives in community-based mural making processes
• 3 Ojos que Sienten: Changing the narrative of seeing through sensory photography
• 4 Turning higher education hierarchies inside out: Sticky encounters in co-designing a community centre using multimodal interventions
• 5 Creative teaching through solidarity networks in the Saharawi refugee camps: Desert Voicebox
• 6 Healing and education through the arts: A HEART-based approach
• 7 Cultivating Black diasporic memories and communities through community archiving
• 8 Cross-cultural collaborations through the lens of art therapy: Sri Lanka
• 9 The arts and creative education as resistance and renewal: Kosovo
• 10 Authentic and ethical fashion design guided by the heart
• 11 Bridging communities through innovation: Art, design, and entrepreneurship: COPE NYC
• 12 Feminist art and education: Facilitating a cross-cultural exchange: U.S.–China Art Summit
• 13 Moving the margins in Malawi: Culturally responsive art education for girls
• Index