Ululas
Athenas (Bringing Sand to the Desert)
ARTifariti2018
Sand is the second most consumed raw material by humans after water, a natural resource which is the main reason for wars in the 21st century and is also very abundant in the Western Sahara occupied by Morocco.
The demand for sand grows year after year. In addition to its use for road and housing construction, the demand from the fracking industry has been added in recent years, which uses sand along with chemical components and water to fracture the dense rock formations that hide oil and gas. This strong demand is surpassing the supply and driving up the price of this raw material, which is encouraging the creation of groups of poachers who 'hunt' sand on deserted beaches and even in the sea.
The history of sand trafficking by Spanish companies dates back to 1955 and therefore to the colonial era. The most notorious example dates back to 1971, when the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council requested 50 million pesetas from the Local Credit bank to acquire sand from the Western Sahara, a total of 141,647 cubic meters of sand (approximately 70,000 tons) for the “Las Teresitas” beach project, the largest artificial beach at the time.
The incessant plunder of the natural resources of the Western Sahara has not ceased since then. The latest event reflected in the national media dates back to June 7, 2017, when the vessel Southwester docked in Mallorca with a cargo of 4,300 cubic meters of sand from the Western Sahara—another blow of the unpunished looting of the Sahara's natural resources, in this case by a Spanish shipping company, which intends to take advantage of Morocco's illegal presence in the territory of the former Spanish colony to systematically exploit the wealth of the Sahrawi territory.
#StopExpolioCulturaSaharaui (Stop Sahrawi Culture Plunder)
Our proposal consists of contributing to visualizing the exploitation through an action that is as simple as it is media-friendly. Given that, ironically, in Spain, the appropriation of beach sand in quantities exceeding 50 grams is penalized, we collected sand from Las Teresitas beach, little by little and over several days, depositing it in small bags and jars.
A portion of the bagged sand has been sent to the Sahrawi School of Arts, and another to the Association of Friendship with the Sahrawi People to be distributed with the aim of finding its way back to the Western Sahara.
The idea was that the bags of sand, in a symbolic act, were emptied in the camps, returning the sand to its place of origin.
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