Abdessamad El Montassir

Trab’ssahl means “The Land of the West” in Hassaniya and refers to a large part of the Sahrawi territory. It is in this land, in this language, within a largely undocumented and absent history, where an ongoing and uninterrupted conflict has transpired for almost 50 years, that Trab’ssahl takes place – a trilogy involving individuals and their silence. The protagonists are from different generations, live in different regions and have different paths in life, but are in parallel situations of exile, silence and need for reparation. The events that took place in this land are not registered through written or oral histories, but exist deep within the geological crevices and the archive of dust that inhabits the boundless desert.
The practice of El Montassir seeks to find ways to show what cannot be seen and to hear things that are not spoken. His films show the lacunae of memory that have been pilfered through histories of erasure and unspoken violence. In response to the collective amnesia that haunts Western Sahara, Abdessamad El Montassir proposes a way of listening to silence, the poetry of resistance, the winds and the sand and detect the signs of a traumatic memory that lives within them, be they human or non-human voices. Stones and dust become silent witnesses to events that we are incapable of accessing. This three-channel film follows the muted language of oblivion and the hardened imprint of struggle that exists as an abstract spectre looming across the vast expanse of perambulatory Sahrawi territory.