Silences of the Desert: Saharawi Lessons for the Anthropocene

By Paulina Serrano Tama

Silences of the Desert: Saharawi Lessons for the Anthropocene is a sensory journey into the refugee camps of Tindouf that asks what the Saharawi can teach us about living within the Anthropocene. Beginning from a breeze that reshapes time and a silence that is full of presence, the film follows conversations and everyday gestures around food, fishing, tea, work and waiting. Through people’s reflections on sea and desert, on migration, war and the desire to return home, the film shows how colonial histories and humanitarian aid have transformed diets, health and relations to territories. At the same time, it foregrounds Saharawi resilience and collective ethics, from women as pillars of the community to young people who stay to work for the common good. Rather than portraying the Saharawi as passive victims, the film invites viewers to listen and to feel with them, and to ask how their ways of inhabiting the desert might guide more just and attentive ways of living within the Anthropocene.

Paulina Serrano Tama is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at University College London. Her work explores the sense of touch and multispecies relations in creating gendered, racialised and labour dynamics within her proposed term Haciendaocene, grounded in the Cosmovivencia of the Red Agroecológica del Austro in the Ecuadorian Andes. As a researcher in the project Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene she has carried out ethnographic research with Saharawi refugees in Algeria, collaborating with international organisations such as the FAO and the United Nations. Trained in Law and Anthropology, she goes beyond examining how extractive industries, colonial histories and humanitarian aid are inscribed in bodies and territories, and asks how we can heal, especially through food systems and everyday practices of care between humans and more-than-humans.

Learning points

When the film suggests that some things cannot be fully explained and must be lived, what kinds of knowledge do you think it is pointing to, and how does it try to convey this through images, sound and silence rather than only through words?
How do the stories about fishing at La Güera, tea drinking and changes in diet complicate usual narratives of food security and humanitarian aid in refugee settings?
What does the film suggest about the relationship between territories, bodies and identity for Saharawi people, and how is this visible in expressions about breathing Saharawi air or feeling the body expand in the desert?
In what ways can Saharawi ways of inhabiting the desert, including their experiences of silence, time and collective responsibility, help us rethink how to live in the Anthropocene beyond the camps?
How does attending to silences of presence and silences of erasure change your understanding of socio-ecological crises and displacement as problems that are often framed only in technical or policy terms?