TODAY it is 40 years since the death of El Uali Mustapha Sayed, the founder of the Polisario Front and its Secretary General just before the recently deceased Mohamed Abdelaziz.

At Sandblast we'd like to commemorate El Uali's life, deeds and death in the battlefield by sharing the article 'Shaheed El Uali Band and Beyond: 40 Years of Resistance Music in Western Sahara', written by our Project Leader Violeta Ruano​ about Shaheed El Uali, the first Saharawi national band, which was created in the Saharawi refugee camps and named after him shortly after his death! 

After the Arab Spring, which was born in the Western Sahara, is it possible to have a proactive type of art, at the same time transformational, that provokes real social change?

​American philosopher Noam Chomsky suggested to the world that the waves of protest that originated in North Africa had really started in Western Sahara at the end of 2010. In fact, the organisational scheme that was imposed in the freedom squares and that Evru collected for the project “The book of the squares” for ARTifariti 2011, had previously designed in the  camp of dignity of El Aaiun, Gdeim Izik, brutally dismantled on November 8 by the Moroccan forces with terrible consequences. The same patterns were repeated, as if in a chain revolution, in Western Sahara, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen… The popular action managed to modify the course of history in many of this places. And among the people demonstrating in the squares, there were cyberactivists and artists who used the Internet to spread their messages and images of change.