Un Angolo Nel Deserto (A corner in the desert) is an editorial project which was left unfinished because of the divergence between the aesthetic views of the author (me) and the editor. It’s a reportage realised between 2008 and 2009 in the Algerian Sahara Desert, in a territory where the Sahrawi people live as refugees since 1975, following the invasion and occupation of their land by Morocco. Western Sahara was illegally annexed to the Moroccan reign and it is, to this day, an object of international contention. The reportage is divided in two sections - the first one is a look at life and customs inside Algerian refugee camps; I have had the luck to travel with an NGO which was very well inserted in the social fabric of the Sahrawi, allowing me to live in close contact with the population and to share everything with them. The second section dwells on the relationship between the Sahrawi people and sickness and consequentially on the presence of western medicine within their fatalistic cultural environment. The organisation I followed was involved in a research on epilepsy, a common pathology in refugee camps whose culprit can be found in filiation between relatives. The figure of the doctor as we are used to conceptualise it causes, in Sahrawi people, curiosity and respect as well as diffidence.

To open or download the entire PDF project copy and paste the web address below:

https://www.alessioanastasi.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Un-angolo-del-deserto-1.pdf