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

It is around 6:30 p.m. when Lahsen S. S. B and I leave the Jaïma ¹ of Zora, his wife, where she hosted me during my stay. We walk through Hausa—a neighborhood in the refugee camp of Smara—between tents, sand constructions, and concrete cells. ² Some children are playing football outside. Young men are shouting over a Cuban version of dominos which often provokes heated interactions. Other than that, the neighborhood is quiet. I feel how distant the refugee camps are from the public infrastructure intended to host international visitors. ³ Lahsen leads me for an informal discussion with Gurba M. L., a close friend of his mother.

Gurba is a Sahrawi political activist who had to flee Western Sahara in the 1970s, and participated in building the refugee camps of Smara and the Sahrawi state in exile. Lahsen decided to meet her after I complained that the director of the Oral Memory Conservation project did not plan to interview women during the following days while women were leading builders of the state and camps. Lahsen, perhaps the most precise researcher and interviewer I have ever met, decided that we would carry out a parallel set of discussions, during which he would introduce me to great women that marked his life and Sahrawi political activism. Most talks concerned life in the refugee camps between 1975 and 1991. During this period, as most of the men were fighting on the armed front of the conflict, women were responsible for the construction of the camp and the state in exile, while also taking care of education, health, crafts, and reproductive labor.

I met Lahsen directly upon my arrival in the Sahrawi refugee camps in February 2020. He is used to collaborating with foreign researchers from the Universidad Autónoma (UAM) and its network in Portugal and France. He works at the Ministry of Culture and is a collaborator and technical advisor for the Oral Memory Conservation project, where I worked in 2020. Lahsen was trained in educational sciences in Cuba during the 1980s and 1990s and is familiar with anthropological methodologies. I must say that without him, I would neither have been able to enter into dialogue with the people we met, nor grasp anything of the depth of knowledge and memories shared.

I was introduced to Lahsen as I worked during several months from Madrid within the group of postcolonial studies in Western Sahara in the faculty of Social Anthropology (UAM). I had the chance to collaborate with Bahia Mahmud Awah and Juan Carlos Gimeno Martin who introduced me to their research and networks. Both have been working on Sahrawi oral and literary epistemologies for years, while expanding their field to new literary forms using several languages developed by diasporas. As such, I have been introduced to research in the refugee camps through the lens of translation ethics, counterhistories and epistemic justice. Since then, my practices have focused on epistemic justice within the architectural and spatial disciplines with an emphasis on alternative infrastructure and epistemologies for spatial history. ⁴

For this interview with Gurba, Lahsen and I are interested in investigating the relations between the traditional nomadic Sahrawi encampment and the refugee camps, and particularly, the extent to which the nomadic pastoralists’ knowledge was mobilized, transformed, and transmitted during this period of open war against the invasion of Western Sahara by Mauritanian and Moroccan armies and civilians.

We are entering the first courtyard of Gurba’s household. They seem to be a well-off family (Figure 1). The main part of the Jaïma is composed of three cinder block rooms. The central one through which we enter leads to a second courtyard. Adjacent are two other sleeping rooms—one for guests, and one for the family. The main room’s floor is divided into three zones, separated by steps. We walk in the room at the lower level and take off our shoes. A step to the room’s left delineates a corridor toward the second courtyard. White tiles cover the corridors. A light-colored carpet and dozens of silver cushions are placed on the highest platform. The white tiles refresh the air in the room while the darkness creates a calm and reposing atmosphere. The tray and other tea-related objects are already arranged neatly on the floor beside the coal-fired stove. The position of these items gently indicates where Gurba will sit and where we should stand. We enter without her announcing our arrival by shouting, “As-salam’ Aleykoum.”

Figure 1. Drawing made after the interview with Gurba M. L. which shows the different spaces of her Jaïma, and some minor histories she shared about it. Drawing by the author.

When coming in, Gurba stops for several seconds at the entrance to welcome us. She wears a large smile, an open and generous gaze, and is in good humor. During our discussion, she shares anecdotes to soften the harshness of her narrative, laughing warmly. Gurba speaks with body movements and gestures. With her hands, she describes places, materialities, and textures of tents, carpets, and other artifacts. She uses objects in the room to describe other forms and construction techniques. She tells us she comes from the Southeast of Western Sahara, from Mijik, in the region of Tirik.

During our exchange, Gurba discusses her life during the year of the Gshou—a particularly arid year that the Sahrawi have named for a species of camel with a white head and brown back. Through this account of the last year she spent nomadizing through Western Sahara, Gurba details the material conditions of life of the Sahrawi women, their families, and their political organization.

Corporealities

Her thoughts, memories, and knowledge introduce how she maintained the presence of her husband’s absence as an architectural corporeality through exile and physical immobilization of her nomad body. ⁵ In the movements performing her domestic landscape, Gurba relies on and transmits pasts through a specific oral and embodied infrastructure, that I designate as her repertoire. ⁶ She articulates plural temporalities and distances with pasts, presents, and futurities, ⁷ through ecological and relational modes of orality and embodiment embodying potential histories. ⁸

I write here on this practice. As a translation from flesh to words, these words will neither transcribe nor exhaust all dimensions of Gurba’s epistemology. Rather, they attempt to enact a contact zone ⁹ from which to echo her expertise, resistance, and struggle for decolonization and epistemic justice and point out how nomadic pastoralist forms of knowledge shape—and are shaped by—the desert. Spoken words endure longer in Western Sahara as they resonate through the land. ¹⁰ For Sahrawis, the desert is not a virgin or hostile nature. Nomadic practices shape the desert, and in return, the desert marks the nomad’s bodies. Most architectural and spatial constructions in Sahrawi nomadic culture are lightweight, easily moveable, and dismountable. This extremely mobile mode of life necessitates that shelters and infrastructures for living are installed and packed up rapidly and repeatedly. Within this ever-shifting territory of human and nonhuman bodies, the Sahrawis have grounded knowledge and history transmissions in orality, embodiment, and the land itself. Flesh and lands are co-constitutive through the words, movements and (im)materialities that shape histories as cohesive and coextensive. This coexistence establishes “infinite correspondences between the land, humans, the dwellings, and the world.” ¹¹

Architectural and spatial nomadic knowledge are built, shared, transmitted, and preserved while remaining undrawn and unwritten, which indeed questions what remains, how it lasts and reappears. To address these questions, I propose methodologies to engage with the repertoire—counterpart of the archive—as an infrastructure for architectural historiographies. These methods strive for epistemic and reparative justice based on historiographies of the flesh, introducing some challenges to render legible these historiographies and legitimize the repertoire as a recognized means of historical production in the international courts. ¹² Using the support of performance studies, I attempt to go against the grain of the architectural discipline that has long been blind and deaf to many voices and bodies. ¹³ This contact zone with Gurba’s architectural histories and their crafting strives for repair and epistemic justice while war is ongoing, refugees are displaced and immobilized, and their plentiful desert plundered and destroyed. ¹⁴

Archives and the Judiciary Paradigm

It is already almost 30 °C when we enter the Archives of the Ministry of Information, which serves as the national archive of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in Rabuni. It is only the beginning of March, but the sun is already beating down. When I enter the archives, I am impressed by the number of documents surrounding me. Along a corridor, I find a room to digitize audio and video material, a small office for the director and a storage room for the audio and video material. Further away, a little room is called the library, with journals from the national periodical, Jeune Afrique, and other publications. Finally, on the right side of the corridor, the main repository includes all journal articles on the Sahrawis and the conflict with Morocco, from 1976 to the present, arranged in thousands of boxes and binders. In the digitizing room, two computers allow access to official photographs from the SADR that are in the process of being sorted for the catalog. ¹⁵ Entering the archive, Lahsen says “Todo lo que quiera aprender sobre los Saharauis lo encontrará aquí (Everything you want to learn about the Sahrawis, you will find it here)” (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Photography of the room for digitization of video material of the Sahrawi Archives of the Ministry of Information in the refugee camp of Rabuni. March 2020. Photograph by the author.

This archive is an infrastructure built by the SADR in exile to collect documents and records produced in the context of events, media, and culture in the refugee camps. It was built in the early 2000s to remember the Sahrawis’ realities, even while they are contested and the means to produce a legible Sahrawi history are limited. It testifies for the existence of the Sahrawi in exile, for themselves, and for foreign eyes. Here we consider the archives as a national infrastructure reducing the distance between “what has happened or is happening,” meaning that remembering is a practice of articulating—literally re-membering—distances between presents and pasts offering understandings of one another. ¹⁶ To achieve this reduction, archives must trace back plural qualities of distances to pasts: temporal, spatial, material, affective, and epistemic. As a field of forces, proximities and distances, pasts shape and are shaped by social and historical constructions and by many infrastructures, discourses, and practices. The archive, as one of these infrastructures, is a transformative threshold delimiting what can be said about what has happened in articulating documents that mediate the presence of past events or practices. ¹⁷ Simultaneously, it enacts potential futurities by framing the field of potential futurities.

In the context of the Sahrawi state in exile, the production of an archive seeks to enable one main future: building international and reparative justice for the Sahrawi people by realizing the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) as a sovereign nation-state in Western Sahara. ¹⁸ Such ambitions are challenged by the hegemonic requirement of legible proofs under the eyes of the judiciary paradigm. Since the beginning of the imperialist claims of the Moroccan Kingdom and Mauritania over Western Sahara, multiple protagonists—including SADR, Front Polisario, Moroccan and Mauritanian authorities—have argued their legitimacy over the territory by using documents (maps, written histories, deeds, and agreements), as definitive testaments to historical claims to land. Just as Mauritania has claimed the ‘imaginary social space’ of the Trab-El-Bidan, the Moroccan regime has developed a narrative based on the existence of a Great Morocco. ¹⁹

As such, the judiciary paradigm has considerably standardized the documents produced and collected in the Archives of the Ministry of Information. The Sahrawis’ lives and cultures are presented from these judiciary vantage points, enacting specific ways to relate to pasts, presents, and futurities. But they also hide many narratives.

In the hegemonic logics of the archive under the judiciary paradigm, oral and embodied knowledge is inaccurately characterized as ephemeral, fragile, and unstable, incapable of producing legible proofs. The supposed untrustworthiness of performance is constructed, producing and reproducing imperialist historical categories, defining who and what can claim access to the production of history. Effectively, colonial authorities often discredited oral and embodied forms of historical crafts to subjugate local knowledge. The demand for securing knowledge and memories is legitimate and is a main concern for displaced populations. However, the demand of providing proofs in the form of documents produces one of the most widespread forms of violence engendered by war, imperialism, nation-state paradigm, and colonialism: the endangerment of indigenous knowing and the destruction of knowledge ecologies by their standardization. ²⁰

Embodied Media as Remainders

Refuting the viability of documents demands providing legible sources that would testify for the claims’ invalidation. In order to provide legible proofs of Sahrawi existence and histories, the Archives of the Ministry of Information endeavor to translate Sahrawi oral and embodied knowledge and memories into archivable documents. This hazardous, nevertheless necessary translation for the achievement of international justice nourishes the leap between what happens, what is stored in archives, and what can be remembered from within its walls. ²¹ The media considered archivable by the judiciary paradigm emphasize specific dimensions and perform a profoundly different work than what is performed by embodied and oral transmission of knowledge. Archivable media and embodied media do not remember the same way—they create and rely on profoundly different knowledge ecologies. Acts of translation modify ecologies of knowledge, the way they remain, and their agency.

Performance is nevertheless a way of accessing and crafting history, as through oral histories, dance, rituals, cooking, sports, and celebrations. ²² It is then critical to acknowledge how performances, oral and embodied knowledge, and memories last, remain, and reappear in myriad ways that may escape archival logics.

However, archival and performative practices are not opposed but complementary; both are ways to reduce the distance with remainders. Remainders are a complex enmeshment of materials and immaterials lasting through plural temporalities. Both archival and performative practices leave traces, are forms of inscriptions, and remember distances with pasts. Performance remains within (im)materialities beyond what is present in the archive and what leaves marks in worldly flesh. These marks along with performances themselves were in Western Sahara the main historiographical sources (Figure 3). ²³ As said by the artist Abdessamad El Montassir:

“When we cross this vast desert, the plants and the mountains remember our traces, and our stories spread into places we have not yet traveled through. An unknown part of us lives in this desert, and an unknown part of this desert lives in us.” ²⁴

Figure 3. Photograph of Lahsen observing the crumbling foundations of a sand-brick construction in the refugee camp of Dajla, abandoned due to the advance of the desert. March 2020. Photograph by the author.

As poetry, nomadic movements and gestures remember the desert—its pasts and its histories. ²⁵ Nevertheless these repertoires of memories, marks, traces, and relations are rarely, if ever, acknowledged as historiographical and evidentiary sources.

Repertoire as Counterarchive

Despite the hundreds of thousands of documents stored in this building, Lahsen’s assertion about the archive was a beautiful but embellished allegory. The discussions we had with aging generations of women political activists were much more reliable and rich historiographical sources than the articles, official records, photographs, microfilms, and books we were able to review on our visit.

To designate this oral and embodied infrastructure of remembrance and its associated practices, I use the term and concept repertoire to counterbalance the conceptual power of the archive. Diana Taylor, a researcher in the field of performance studies, first developed this concept in her book entitled The Archive and the Repertoire. She writes:

“The rift, I submit, does not lie between the written and the spoken words, but between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sport, rituals).” ²⁶

The repertoire points to embodied forms of knowledge and memories, to which belong songs, gestures, dances, celebrations, sports, and habits. The temporalities through which the repertoire remains and reappears are the temporalities of performance. ²⁷ The repertoire possesses the qualities of presence only when embodied and performed—it is held by and in between (knowing) bodies (of knowledge), remaining within reach of their gestures. Through these embodied and performative transmissions, the repertoire profoundly challenges assumptions on what remains from performances and events, what lasts, how it endures, and how the remainders’ trustworthiness is framed.

Further, Diana Taylor writes, “as opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same. The repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning.” ²⁸ Within this infrastructure, knowledge and memory are transmitted body-to-body, and one can only access a repertoire through presence. They migrate ²⁹ and are transformed through movements of incorporation and excorporation while potentially remaining the same. The grammar of the archive—including concepts like authenticity, authority, fidelity, originality, and accessibility— is not valid, and could even be harmful, within the logics of the repertoire.

Taylor’s “repertoire” introduces a consistent and coherent concept to reclaim the repertoire as a legible infrastructure and legitimate source in the context of Sahrawi epistemologies and knowledge transmission practices. It raises the questions: what are the grammars of the repertoire, and can they conceptually counterbalance the archive toward reparative justice? Which distances, proximities, and histories are crafted when the repertoire is the principal infrastructure to remember pasts and presents? Which kinds of historiographies emerge from bodies and the repertoire as primary sources and infrastructure?

For the Sahrawi experiencing protracted displacement, forced immobilization, and prolonged refugeehood, methods and infrastructures of transmitting knowledge and histories are a matter of cultural and epistemic death or life. The Sahrawi repertoire has been shaped by the desert while shaping the desert in return for generations (Figure 4) ³⁰ . Sahrawi refugees’ histories are supported by the repertoire and the traces it leaves, sources of common histories as present corporealities. Yet documentary evidence is still necessary for the achievement of international justice.

Figure 4. Photography taken during a visit to the site of Ed Jal, a former refugee camp abandoned at the beginning of the 1980s after a flood that carried the river bed away. The right shadow is Lahsen’s, and the left one is mine. March 2020. Photograph by the author.

On the hamada (high plateau) of Tindouf, these problems arise with profound urgency. Six Sahrawi refugee camps occupy the dry and rocky landscape, including Dajla at the desert’s edge. In this milieu, hostilities to pastoralist nomadism force the immobilization of Sahrawis, short-circuiting nomadic knowledge transmission.

Apart from the threat posed by knowledge standardization, which politics of conservation/preservation could be implemented for the repertoire to continue its migration when there are no means to transmit it as the movements are physically constrained? How could a nomadic pastoralist repertoire of spatial and architectural knowledge be transmitted while the bodies of the nomads are immobilized?

Gurba, in maintaining an affective and effective presence of pasts and past futures in her spatial domestic corporealities, brings some answers. As opposed to the segregative chronologics of the archive, her repertoire supports the remembrance of pasts, presents, and futurities, while her gestures enable the maintenance and migration of embodied futurities.

A Ghost in the Jaïma

Arriving in the refugee camp at the end of the 1970s, Gurba faced harsh living conditions. As most Sahrawis, Gurba and her family were forced to leave behind goods and herds when fleeing to Algeria to travel fast and hide from the aerial attack from the Moroccan and French armies. The families settled on the hamada of Tinduf, on land that the Algerian government provided to the fleeing Sahrawi resistance. The hamada is characterized by higher levels of water scarcity and lower levels of biodiversity—especially vegetal—than the rich and plentiful landscapes of Western Sahara. As almost no herds made the journey, food resources were scarce and Sahrawis went through an immense food and sanitary crisis, depending entirely on Algerian and international humanitarian support.

The conditions of exodus, combined with the precariousness of life on the hamada, forced Sahrawis to abandon a significant element of Sahrawi material culture: the traditional Jaïma. The tent fabrication, using goat and camel wool, was a central infrastructure of support between Sahrawi women of the same Qabila. ³¹ The weaving, which could take several months for a new bride and close relatives to complete, represented an unbearable workload. In the first years of the SADR and refugee camps, women cared for family and injured people, taught, and built the camps, their infrastructures, and, indeed, the state. ³² Busy with these burdens and unable to construct their own Jaïma, Sahrawi women were forced in a type of double displacement—forced to leave behind their traditional building practices even as they were forced to leave their lands.

Immediately upon settling, the 50,000 Sahrawi refugees ³³ received dozens of tents from UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) ³⁴ (Figure 5) to protect from the coldness of the night and harshness of the sun. As the supply of tents was limited, they were mainly used for hospitals and schools. At this time, women had to take off their Melfas (Sahrawi veils) to use them to shade communal spaces and temper the climate for their families and relatives. Most families received individual tents some years later, in the early 1980s, and UNHCR tents became the main interior domestic unit of Sahrawis in exile. The tents have remained, until today, a central element of the Sahrawi refugee camps on the hamada, mainly serving as the living room. The interiors are now entirely lined with fabrics and carpets to lower the temperature and make it hospitable (Figure 6).

Figure 5. Official design documents of the “Tuareg Tent” produced by UNHCR Shelter and Settlement Section. UNHCR, “Shelter Design Catalogue,” January 2016. Image Credit: UNHCR Shelter and Settlement Section. Free for use.

Figure 6. View of Dajla, where the tents of NGOs, sand-brick constructions, and concrete block constructions are interwoven. In the background stand a garden, mostly of dates and tomatoes, and further, the ruins of one of the first sand-brick buildings of Dajla, built by women in the 1980s. March 2020. Photograph by the author.

In the Sahrawi traditional nomadic encampments, called Frīq, or Fīrgans, objects and bodies in the Jaïma were arranged precisely according to the generational and gendered divisions of labor. The men’s objects—related to war, politics, and large-scale economic exchanges—stood east of the tent. On the western side of the tent stood all the valuable objects which pertain to women in traditional Sahrawi society—related to domestic labor, the transformation of raw materials, craftswomanship, education, and breeding of small livestock. Bodies also occupied each side according to their gender. This ecology of nonhuman and human bodies was deeply entrenched and supported the habits of the nomadic pastoralist population when living throughout Western Sahara (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Layout of the interior space of a traditional Jaïma. Diagram drawn by the author according to Sophie Caratini’s anthropological studies of the Reguibat, the main Qabila that constituted the Sahrawi population. We can see the objects’ “feminine” and “masculine” orientations through the tent and the position of bodies. Image Source: Sophie Caratini, Les Rgaybāt: 1610–1934. 2: Territoire et Société. ³⁸ Image: Julien Lafontaine Carboni.

When forced to leave the traditional Jaïma and settle in the UNHCR tents, most objects of Sahrawi material cultures were missing. But Gurba organized objects according to the same habits and domestic ecology as in the Jaïmas. Her objects and tools were arranged on the western side, with her clothes and those of her children.

At this moment, Gurba’s husband was absent. The conflict between the Polisario Front and the Moroccan armies for self-determination was open and armed until the ceasefire of 1991. Most men only came back from time to time, if they ever came back at all. Gurba—as did most women—refused to occupy the void at the eastern side of the tent left by the absence of her husband. In perpetuating this domestic repertoire of knowledge, gestures, and habits, Gurba both refused to accept the colonization of her land and futurities, and reclaimed her husband’s space and land back.

The interior of Gurba’s tent remained the same until the mid–1980s. Living conditions improved thanks to a high level of organization in the Sahrawi society in exile and international support. Families could afford fabric extensions, which women built on the southeast side of the tent for better air circulation. The slight separation of the extension allowed for domestic objects to be more spaced out within the dwelling and away from heat sources, leading to a drastic reduction in the number of fires in the camp. These extensions enabled women to maintain the absence of their husbands as a present corporeality.

By 1985, Gurba told us, women had built public infrastructures—hospitals, schools, administrative and political centers—and possessed both the knowledge and the time to manufacture sand bricks. They began to construct the first permanent domestic elements of the refugee camps. Kitchens started to populate the landscape, replacing the awnings in the space southeast of the main living room. Because they helped to reduce fires while maintaining domestic ecologies, kitchens built of sand bricks in such an orientation would continue as a new norm for the organization of the camps to this day.

During our discussion, Lahsen and I sketched a diagram (Figure 8) to translate Gurba’s explanation. It makes clear the absence of objects as an active force, and how it unfolded in time. Her repertoire of everyday gestures and habits perform and reenact the presence of pasts without going through any forms of narrative acts. While her material and architectural culture and her land were torn away from her, Gurba’s performance generates architectural spatialities and further transmits an architectural repertoire of knowledge and memories. Unlike the archive as an infrastructure of remembrance, the repertoire’s performance traces back many forms of distances (affective, temporal, physical) without the necessary use of documents or artifacts.

Figure 8. Disposition of the interior space of the Jaïma and relations to other tents in the camp between 1980 and 1991. In the middle is drawn in plan a UNHCR tent, on the left of the tent (west) are represented the domestic object, on the bottom right of the tent is figured a fabric extension as described by Gurba above. Diagram made with Lahsen and the author during an interview with Gurba on the 8th of March 2020. We can see the women’s object on the tent’s west side and the kitchen’s position on the east, with the fabric extension.

Gurba proves that an immense architectural repertoire of knowledge and memories expands current architectural historiographies. This repertoire exists beyond the buildings, beyond the land, and beyond the documents, drawings and other artifacts produced by construction processes that populate the archive. This other infrastructure of knowledge production and transmission could expand architectural historiographies to other means, media and temporalities.

Nomadic Physics

The narration of Gurba’s performances makes clear that embodied acts and performances “generate, record, and transmit” knowledge, memories, and histories by reducing the distance with materials, spaces, and times. Challenging “the object of classical physics,” bound by distinct temporal frames and discrete supposedly lasting materials, the spatial presence of Gurba’s pasts and everyday performances constitute a nomadic physics, mobilizing (im)material qualities within plural temporalities. ³⁵ In Gurba’s home, the permanent objects of classical physics do not endure a longer distance in time than would performances and their remainders. Gurba’s repertoire drastically reduces temporal distances by embodying preempted pasts and futurities in the present—literally traversing spacetime. ³⁶ Thus Gurba’s corporealities collapse spacetime’s linearities and offer an alternative to seemingly more persistent and legible traces in the Archives of the Ministry of Information.

Amidst colonial and hegemonic violence in the battlefields producing competing historical narratives, it is urgent to enact a contact zone between the physics of remainders protected by the archive and those not yet legitimized, produced by the repertoire. As Gurba showed, the physics of repertoire’s remainders profoundly differs from the archival object. It is impossible to think of the repertoire as disembodied. The bodies remembering are produced by social, cultural, gendered, and racial systems of taxonomy, disciplinarization, and historicization. The embodiment of the repertoire can vary while the meaning remains the same. Thus corporealities are not objects separated from performing bodies and they cannot be original. Gurba’s remembrance practices might be best described by terms such as scenarios that “do not reduce gestures and embodied practices to narrative description,” while their grammars introduce dimensions such as subjectivity, trust, participation, body-to-body, singularity, and difference without separability. ³⁷ Taking the flesh as a point of departure for thinking a renewed physics positions performance as a legitimized remainder for history. Pursuing reparative justice means turning our attention to how flesh is marked through performances while rendering them legible.

Sahrawi Repertoire as Site of Resistance

During our discussions, Gurba insisted that giving hospitality and space to the absence of her husband was a weapon to fight for return. In enacting this space and perpetuating her nomadic habits and knowledge, she cared for and gave hospitality to futurities that are not a projected reality. They exist as a present corporeality, as affective dimensions of the real.

Her performances were articulating complex layers of (im)materialities and temporalities, reducing the distance with pasts. She introduced objects of history with profoundly different physics than their archival counterparts, objects that remain and reappear nonlinearly in time and space while leaving marks on flesh.

This text aimed at creating a contact zone with these objects. Gurba’s embodied practice of remembrance points to an infinite depth of undrawn, unwritten, and as-yet-unrecognized spatial and architectural heritage, that remains in the repertoire and reappears through performance. Further, establishing the repertoire as a legible and legitimate source is central to the struggle for epistemic and reparative justice for the Sahrawi, decolonizing the Western Sahara by advancing evidentiary spatial practices beyond the frames of the judiciary paradigm, preserving Sahrawi knowledge and futurities.

Beyond a simplistic opposition between the written and the spoken words, I tried to show that the repertoire and historiographies of the flesh could enmesh with archival practices and preservation politics to promote epistemic justice. These frameworks are particularly relevant in preservation politics generally and the architectural field particularly, which has been and is still subject to hegemonic archival logics in its historiographies. Extrapolating some conclusions of this article—besides material architectural heritage and all the documents, drawings, and other artifacts produced by architectural and constructive practices that populate archives and build up current architectural historiographies and history—an immense architectural repertoire of knowledge and memories, as another infrastructure of knowledge production and transmission, could expand architectural historiographies to other means, media and temporalities. And the extent of minor narratives that could be unearthed and heard from these repertoires remains to be imaginable.

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.

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).