In late 1975, after Morocco invaded Western Sahara, the Sahrawi resistance began gathering photographs of Moroccan soldiers captured or killed in combat. Most of these photographs were simple portraits of soldiers’ wives, their girlfriends, their children, their parents, or pictures of everyday life in Morocco. During the war years, these photographs became an involuntary archive stored in temporary places in the Algerian desert, where exiled Sahrawis had sought refuge.

Today, these images are waiting for the necessary conditions, the end of the occupation and the ongoing conflict, to be returned to their owners: returned not to the state, but to the families who lost their loved ones in a hidden war.

(Intervention in English with simultaneous translation into Spanish)

In her practice, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh explores the possibilities of human action through experimental and collective work processes. These processes include archival practices such as negotiating a digital archive set up with people from Burj al-Shamali, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Photography acts as a means for her to communally investigate the notions of collectivity, power, and resistance; for example, with his commitment as a member of the Arab Image Foundation and with the focus of his PhD in Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (2018).