Somaliland, a name that sounds like a Disneyland pavilion and a country whose existence is unknown to a vast part of the world's population, which was my case before disembarking at the airport of Hargeisa, its capital. This de facto nation is located in the Horn of Africa, and was a British colony until the early 60's, when the United Kingdom and Italy decided to grant independence to Somaliland and Somalia simultaneously by unifying the two countries and establishing the Republic of Somalia. This unification was never fully accepted by the people of Somaliland as they already considered themselves an autonomous state so in 1991 Somaliland decided to declare their autonomy by proclaiming their independence from Somalia; independence which since that date has not been ratified by Somalia or any other country or international organization.

 

I arrived in Somaliland to join a multidisciplinary team to conduct an exploratory mission with the goal of studying the effects of a devastating drought affecting the area and the deterioration of humanitarian conditions linked to it; our job was to try to identify possible projects to patch the problem, which was found later to be more complex than just the lack of water. As we traveled around the country and our exploration progressed, my need to photograph also grew; I started photographing during these various trips in this state that no one recognizes as such and only exists in the collective subconscious of its inhabitants. Being humanitarian also means taking into account the reality of the countries in which we work in , and bring to the attention of the rest of the world those that we tend to forget. Ethics dictate that we ask permission from the subject before photographing ; This work raises this ethical question between the desire to capture what a country hides behind its borders and the respect for its privacy.

 

The use of movement and blur, effects directly linked to the tinted windows used for the work, allows the images here to show without revealing, to make art without identities. A hidden country of inconspicuous people, where photographers are sometimes perceived as external marauders to this national autonomy. The images present here do not intend to show the daily life of this nation nor are they a representation of its reality. The images are a representation of what cannot be seen of this country; a reality seen through the dark tint of car windows, through the peephole of a moving vehicle that shows that place in the world where its intimacy has to be extracted from the only possible position… imperceptible and spontaneous. This work represents those who simply want to be.