Besançon (Doubs). 1975. After a century of occupation, Spanish troops withdraw from Western Sahara. The vast desert territory on the borders of Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania was immediately annexed by the Moroccan army. Bombing of refugee camps, summary executions, torture: the army is exacting a heavy price from the Sahrawi population. Fifty years later, silence reigns on these arid lands beaten by the winds; the youngest vainly question their elders, withdrawn in profound silence. This impossibility of transmission, Abdessamad El Montassir (born in 1989), artist-researcher from the Sahara of southern Morocco, has been documenting it for more than ten years. It is also the common thread of the exhibition that the Frac Franche-Comté is currently devoting to it.
“A long night passed itself off as day”
In his quest for an unspeakable truth, Abdessamad El Montassir adopts the language of the masters of contemplative cinema (Andreï Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr). His camera goes back and forth between the immensity of the steppe, the khayma (traditional dwellings of nomads) bending under the gusts and the faces of Sahrawis frozen in expectation. Long fixed shots, horizontal pans with slow motion, time lapse : these animated paintings give the illusion of suspended time.
At times, some laconicisms attempt to express the trauma through metaphor. “ This land has become black”confides Abnou (Trab’ssahl Abnou, 2023), while Khadija announces that a “long night pretended to be day” (Galb’Echaouf2021). Then the body bears witness when speech runs out of steam. The camera lingers on Sheriff’s face (Trab’ssahl Sheriff2023) and crystallizes its eminently significant views. Abdessamad El Montassir develops an art filled with modesty and poetry, capable of transcribing through images alone – visual or textual – a myriad of sensations.
The four videos presented in the exhibition are also crossed by legends in forms borrowed from oral tradition. Are they really passed down from generation to generation or are they the result of the artist’s imagination? It doesn’t matter, as long as they fill in the gaps in a story without an outline. The leaves of the Daghmous (emblematic desert cactus), once bright green, would have changed into thorns during the annexation, we learn for example in Galb’Echaouf. El Montassir’s work lies at the crossroads of lyricism and ethnography.
The small number of works – around ten, including three sound installations – however leaves visitors wanting more. Since the artist began his research on the Sahara in 2014, why limit the corpus to his works produced between 2021 and 2025? It would have been interesting to discover his research projects on plants, carried out during his residencies at the Atelier de l’Observatoire, in Casablanca, and at IMéRA – Institute of Advanced Studies in Marseille between 2014 and 2018, especially since the video Galb’Echaouf is its extension. As such, the Frac presentation is more akin to a large immersive installation than to a monographic exhibition.
