Repertoire as Infrastructure for Architectural Historiographical Crafts in the Sahrawi Refugee Camps

Abstract

This article retraces a discussion with Gurba M. L., a Sahrawi activist who participated in building the refugee camp of Smara near Tindouf, Algeria, and Lahsen S. S. B, a Sahrawi researcher and collaborator in the Oral Memory Conservation project of the Ministry of Culture. Drawing on fieldwork and recent scholarship in performance studies and architectural history, it describes the repertoire as an infrastructure for historiographical crafts and alternative to the archives in transmitting and preserving gestures, movements and orality for the Sahrawi people. As performed ephemerally through distinct spatial practices in the domesticities of the camp, the repertoire constructs space and history outside of prevalent judiciary and nation-state paradigms that bias documentary evidence to legitimize claims to space and land. Gurba’s performance of nomadic spatial practices illuminates broader Sahrawi resistance efforts seeking to realize epistemic and reparative justice, maintaining the futurities preempted by war and colonialism, while conflict is ongoing, refugees displaced, and Western Sahara’s plentiful deserts plundered.

Keywords:

• Sahrawi refugee camps
• Western Sahara
• oral and embodied epistemologies
• domestic resistance
• repertoire
• architecture and performance
• epistemic justice
• historiography
• counterarchival practices

Notes

1 The word Jaïma is translated as tent but also, in Hassanyia, as home or mother’s womb, and equally refers to a simple carpet laid on the ground. I use the orthography Jaïma and not Khaïma, as the Hassanyia writings into the Latin alphabet were made using Spanish pronunciations (and not French).

2 Smara is a Sahrawi refugee camp administered by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) located in the southwest of Algeria, near the city of Tindouf. Since the mid-1970s, thousands of Sahrawis have been living in exile after the Moroccan invasion.

The colonization of Western Sahara was coordinated with Mauritanian authorities in the south, and agreed with the Spanish regime of Franco through the signature of the Acuerdos Trespartitos de Madrid (November 14, 1975). Since then, the Moroccan regime extracts resources from Sahrawi lands without agreements (notably phosphorus and fish), destroys the Sahara by engineering its landscapes for military purposes (through building the sand berm and spreading landmines), and forbids Sahrawi nomadic pastoralist modes of life by restraining movements.

The refugee camp of Smara, as all other camps, is located close to the border of Mauritania, Western Sahara, and Morocco, where they are protected from potential Moroccan aerial attacks. The camp was built throughout the 1980s, and hosted fleeing Sahrawi. This camp is mainly composed of inhabitations, even if some public infrastructures were created to host international visitors and administer the camps.

3 As argued by anthropologist Konstatina Isidoros, public infrastructures were built in part to host international visitors. Most of them cultivate the image of Ideal Refugees, acknowledged by various international institutions and NGOs in the 1980s, for the Sahrawi efforts to build a democratic state in exile with self-administered camps.

This status was built upon: a highly organized self-administration of the refugee camps; democratic practices of election and political debates; cultivated gender equality; the highest degree of literacy in the African continent within a highly educated population; and, as argued by some scholars, the practice of a moderated form of Islam. See Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival, 1st Ed., Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014). This is the reason the word public remains in italic throughout the article when discussing these infrastructures.

However, in the Sahrawi refugee camps, political life and activism largely take place outside the realm of the public infrastructures, and they remain empty when foreign visitors leave. See Konstantina Isidoros, Nomads and Nation-Building in the Western Sahara: Gender, Politics and the Sahrawi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

4 Questions around epistemic justice in architectural and spatial histories and disciplines in the context of Western Sahara and the Sahrawi struggle for self-determination are addressed in Julien Lafontaine Carboni and Abdessamad El Montassir, “Uneven Distances: About the Limits of Transmission, Acts of Remaining and Means of Reappearance of the Sahara,” in Unearthing Traces. Dismantling the Entanglements of Archives, Landscape and the Built Environment, ed. Nitin Bathla, Denise Bertschi, and Julien Lafontaine Carboni (Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 2023).

5 Architectural corporeality refers to architectural spatialities that are enacted by gestures and performances, that depend on architectural material dimensions and are produced by embodied acts.

6 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

7 The term futurities is used in opposition to future, referring to Elizabeth Povinelli’s arguments on the ways in which marginalized communities are excluded from dominant (visions of) the future, and how inequalities are prolonged in time by this exclusion. Attempting to imagine beyond linear time and imperial chronologies, futurities suggest a multiplicity in which epistemologies of time coexist without subjugating one another. See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Inheritance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).

8 Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019).

9 Mary Louis Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991, 34.

10 Bahia Mahmud Awah, Tiris, Rutas Literarias: Periplo por la Ruta del Verso y los Eruditos del Sahara Occidental, 1st ed., Memoria Saharaui (Madrid: Última Línea, 2016).

11 Maïa Tellit Hawad, “Sahara Mining: The Wounded Breath of Tuareg Lands,” The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies 44 (The Desert) (October 2022): 29.

12 The term historiography of the flesh derives from critical race theory and feminist Black poethics and attempts to acknowledge embodied and corporeal epistemologies, unravel the hieroglyphics of the flesh, and open the physics of remainders and lives widely. Denise Ferreira da Silva writes:

The whole grammar of modern thought—and not only, but definitely also, the “American grammar” that Spillers explains so powerfully[…] may not resist on the onslaught of materiality, in particular if it does not rely on the forms of the body but instead takes the flesh, thought of as […] the elemental (as opposed to the physical) moment of matter, as the point of departure for thinking. Thinking with the flesh, one can contemplate the possibility of traversing spatiotemporal boundaries, as the “transfer” Spillers invites us to wonder about definitely recalls that slave labor did occur, that the transfer of potential energy (flesh, bones, blood, etc.) of the enslaved person’s body did result in the creation of value.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, On the Antipolitical/Series, ed. Ana Teixeira Pinto, vol. 1 (London: Sternberg Press, 2022), 47. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17: 2 (1987): 65–81, https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.

13 Janina Gosseye, “A Short History of Silence: The Epistemological Politics of Architectural Historiography,” in Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research, ed. Janina Gosseye, Naomi Stead, and Deborah Van der Plaat, 1st ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), 9–23.

14 Until 1975, this desert and most of the land of Western Sahara was colonized by the Kingdom of Morocco, and its resources were plundered. Adding to the ecocide, the militarization of the border between occupied and liberated territories led to the construction of a sand berm and the proliferation of thousands of landmines. See Meriem Naïli, “Natural Resources in Western Sahara: A Fishy Battle at the Doors of Europe,” L’Ouest Saharien 9: 1 (2019): 135–53, https://doi.org/10.3917/ousa.191.0135.

15 The films were mainly produced during the first years of the camps. Unfortunately, the archive does not possess the material to read and preserve them in good condition.

16 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, New University of Minnesota Press edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 63.

17 Foucault describes the archives as a transformative threshold that safeguards what remains of an event and “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements,” enabling the system of an event’s enunciability and functioning. See Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, Routledge Classics (London; New York: Routledge, 2002),146. See also Michel Foucault, Il Faut Défendre la Ssociété: Cours au Collège de France, 1975–1976, Hautes Études (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997), and Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12: 2 (2008): 1–14.

18 Inma Naïma Zanoguera, “Toward a Decolonial Worldmaking in the Western Sahara,” The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies 43 (Diasporas) (August 2022).

19 See Alicia Campos-Serrano and José Antonio Rodríguez-Esteban, “Imagined Territories and Histories in Conflict During the Struggles for Western Sahara, 1956–1979,” Journal of Historical Geography 55 (January 2017): 44–59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2016.11.009.

20 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (London New York: Routledge, 2016).

21 It is, however, of tremendous importance not to associate colonial and postcolonial authorities with archival infrastructures and legitimacy while indigenous forms of knowledge would be oral and embodied. There is no simplistic opposition between local forms of remembrance against authoritative archival accounts. Oral and embodied forms of remembrance imply power relationships in the production of history, while many archival practices exist beyond the hegemonic and/or imperialist gestures of removals. See some examples in Azoulay, Potential History.

22 Omnia El Shakry, “‘History Without Documents’: The Vexed Archives of Decolonization in the Middle East,” The American Historical Review 120: 3 (June 2015): 920–34, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/120.3.920.

23 Most architectural and spatial bodies in Sahrawi nomadic culture are light. Thus, even in the refugee camps, the traces left by their occupation are hard to read by untrained eyes, and one needs to learn how to engage with these physical traces. For these reasons, beyond the vestiges of foundations, the landscape seemed at first sight empty to me. For Lahsen, on the contrary, it was populated by thousands of material witnesses.

24 Abdessamad El Montassir, Galb’Echaouf (Morocco, Western Sahara: Abdessamad El Montassir, 2021), https://vimeo.com/516902536.

25 See, for example, the collection of essays, narratives, poems, etc., gathered in Samia Henni, ed., Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022). She writes about the objectives of the volume:

“It aspires to voice this critique and divulge these methodologies, which are, in many cases, the only plausible way to record desert stories and histories. Some of these accounts evidence how the imaginaries and imageries of “empty” deserts get propagated and carried over time through materials, bodies, institutions, archives, poems, plans, maps, so on, and how they fulfill State and corporate interests in “filling” desert landscapes and their desires to do so.”

Samia Henni, ed., “Against the Regime of ‘Emptiness,’” in Deserts Are Not Empty, 18.

26 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 19.

27 In her seminal text Rebecca Schneider writes:

“When we approach performance not as that which disappears (as the archive expects), but as both the act of remaining and a means of reappearance (though not a metaphysics of presence) we almost immediately are forced to admit that remains do not have to be isolated to the document, to the object, to bone versus flesh.”

In Rebecca Schneider, “Performance Remains,” Performance Research 6: 2 (January 2001): 103.

28 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 20.

29 Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, eds., Migrations of Gesture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

30 In the archives, we found no mention of the camp of Ed Jal. Moreover, I never read about any of these former camps in the occidental literature on the refugee camps, whether written by anthropologists, NGO members, political scientists, or any other international visitors. The history of the refugee camps is much more complex than presented in these sources. It has nothing to do with some Sahrawi settling in one place or another and gradually developing these sites, creating new neighborhoods, and accumulating infrastructures. Instead, the populations moved several times looking for security, resources, or because of natural hazards. Some camps were built for new arrivals before they were given proper space in a neighborhood. Some military camps were abandoned, and some camps organized around agricultural experimentation disappeared, as did others for families with herds. Together with Lahsen, we looked for more information on these camps in the archive but did not find any records or documents mentioning their existence.

31 Qabila designates the former social organization in Western Sahara. The Sahrawi population comprises several Qabilas: the Reguibat, Tekna, Larossien, O. Tidrarin, O. Delim, and more subgroups. The word has been widely translated as “tribes,” which remains an exogenous appellation for many diverse social realities.

32 Konstantina Isidoros, Nomads and Nation-Building in the Western Sahara: Gender, Politics and the Sahrawi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

33 The accurate number of Sahrawi refugees is both the subject of controversies between the SADR and the Moroccan authorities, and difficult to estimate accurately due to the high degree of mobility of refugees. In 2005, the population was estimated at 45,000 to 50,000 for the Moroccan authorities, 155,000 by the UNHCR, and 165,000 by the SADR. Today, the population is estimated by the UNHCR to be around 200,000. According to the Algerian and Sahrawi authorities, in the late 1970s and early 1980s the number of refugees would have been about 50,000.

34 The type of tent provided by NGOs (especially UNHCR) until the beginning of the conflict was given the name “Tuareg Tent,” showing little level of adaptation of these tents to Sahrawi culture, despite the length of the conflict. Effectively, Sahrawis are composed of several ethnic groups, but none are Tuaregs.

35 Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt, 157. Denise Ferreira da Silva critiques classical physics emphasizing the construction of objectivity, neutrality, and separability, which hides and erases the colonial and racialized histories that underpin scientific histories while subjugating other epistemologies and knowledge systems. Effectively, she argues that classical physics instantiate objects with qualitative–principle of identity–and quantitative dimensions–principle of equality–which allows them to be measured and separable in/from Time and Space. The objects of classical physics are neutral(ized), universal(ized), and separated from power relations, colonial legacies and epistemic injustice they produced and reproduced. She advocates for a decolonial approach to physics, sciences, and epistemology based on a raw materialist approach.

36 To read more on the materialities and temporalities of affective images, see Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, “Windowish Practices, Unreadable Backgrounds, and Raw Semiotics. Tracing Minor Architectures and Ecologies of Signs in Women’s Writing,” ZARCH 18 (September 2, 2022): 210–19, https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.2022186216.

37 Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 17.

38 Sophie Caratini, Les Rgaybāt: 1610 - 1934. 2: Territoire et Société (Paris: Éd. L’Harmattan, 1989).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julien Lafontaine Carboni

Julien Lafontaine Carboni (they/them) is an architect, educator, researcher and activist based at EPFL and ETHZ, working for epistemic and social justice in architecture and the built environment. Their research investigates politics and infrastructures of architectural history, historiographies of the flesh, oral and embodied epistemologies, reenactments and queer performativity. They coedited the book Unearthing Traces, Dismantling the Imperialist Entanglements of Archives, Landscapes and the Built Environment (EPFL Press, 2023), and are published in Architecture and Culture, Charrette, Plan Libre, L’atelier, GTA Papers and Tabula Rasa. They received their PhD from EPFL (Lausanne) in 2022, and their dissertation was entitled “(from) the repertoire: an architectural theory of operations.” They currently work at ALICE, EPFLausanne, and as the Chair of Architectural Heritage and Sustainability at ETHZurich. They have been engaged in institutional activism in the DRAGlab since 2020 at EPFL, advocating for more inclusive and diverse curricula by introducing and supporting antiracist, feminist, and queer theories and practices within architecture schools.