“Remember that the world is made of stories” – someone said to me. We stumble, every day, in a loving speech with the greatest points of loneliness, where we lose our speech and the difficulty is not remembering but forgetting. Here, I live to forget. Unrolling the silence of those who feel the other lose their speech. Today, it is in me that this speech is missing. I scream not to be alone, expressing a composite of identity, silence and passion, when looking at the relationship of the self with the other and the relationship of the self to the self. Of how it transforms us, of how we almost don't find ourselves and how we redefine. Each image is a fragment of this transformation and its whole is the confused piece where it is inserted. This is just another story.
At the 3rd oldest active refugee camp in the world, Western Sahara’ women have been confined to the open air for more than 44 years. During the night, they crossed into the desert to flee with their children from white phosphorus and napalm bombs, stepping on bodies and huddling in vans until reaching safe land, building from scratch one of the most organized refugee camps in the world, according to some international humanitarian organizations. After the ceasefire with Morocco, men returned and these same women had to reinvent themselves in order to exist, without giving up their rights. The last African colony remains lost within the international political discussion, but women in Sahara give proof to the world that they know exactly what they wish.
Maria João Salgado, was born in Portugal, in 1992 and has studied at the Portuguese Institute of Photography (IPF) and at Institute of Cultural and Artistic Production (IPCI) in Porto. Since 2015 she has been focusing on Documental Photography, mainly developing projects on human rights and alternative living communities. Currently, she is focusing on a more artistic approach, developing themes on personal issues.
