Where the Desert Forgets

Where the Desert Forgets is a photographic project along Western Sahara's coast under Moroccan control. Through images of absence and repetition, it reveals a territory reconfigured to conceal its history, fifty years after Spanish withdrawal.

Where the Desert Forgets is a photographic project developed along the coast of Western Sahara under Moroccan control, fifty years after Spain's withdrawal from the territory. The work is situated in a space marked by the absence of recognized sovereignty and by a prolonged conflict that has been progressively displaced from the international public imagination.

The project examines how a new visual, symbolic, and ideological layer has been imposed over a previous one that has been deliberately erased or relegated, through tourism development, infrastructure expansion, natural resource exploitation, and official discourses of progress and normalization. These transformations produce a landscape that appears neutral and functional, but is profoundly political, where history is silenced and memory becomes uncomfortable.

The project focuses on absence, repetition, and surface. Coastal spaces, generic architectures, transit zones, and intervened landscapes reveal a territory reconfigured to conceal its own historical condition. This series of images portray minimal signs of a structural violence that manifests itself through order, cleanliness, and visual continuity.