Community Art Tent: Sahrawi Dialogues on Nomadic Knowledges 

The tent (Khayma) has long been the primary dwelling for the Sahrawi people who, for centuries, have been the Indigenous Nomads of Western Sahara. The tent functions both as a space for communal living and shared meals, as well as a crucial refuge in the harsh environment of the Hamada desert. 

This tent installation here at Rhoneymeade Fest 2025 is a collaboration between international artist Mohamed Sleiman Labat who visited Penn State during the month of April 2025 as the John Anderson Endowed Lecture series artist, and Dr. Ann Holt, a Penn State Assistant professor of Art Education and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. They made the tent as part of a sustained project called Sister Garden Exchange, which is a metaphor for living arts embodied pedagogies and relational practices that happen in and through a garden. 

Visitors are welcome to enter and sit inside this tent which provides a representation and an internal space, to immerse themselves in something most likely unfamiliar to them within the global story of climate change, self-determination, land rights, and sovereignty. 

In 1975, the Sahrawi were displaced into five refugee camps, fleeing the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. Mohamed Sleiman Labat was born in 1986 in a tent in the refugee camp Dakhla. Most Sahrawi, like him, are stateless individuals and still reside in the camps where there are an estimated 173,000 people across the five camps. Due to having to relinquish their nomadic lifestyle and being restricted to one place in the harsh desert environment, the Sahrawi must rely heavily on humanitarian aid for food and water. 

Therefore, it is in this context today, that the tent becomes an empowering symbol of the shared identity of the Sahrawi people and the communal bonds that life in the desert brings. Most importantly, the tent also serves as a critical space of resistance for transmitting/preserving desert knowledges and cultural traditions-- a space for sharing/generating dialogue about their past nomadic lifestyle and ways of being to the future generations. 

In their oral language, Hassaniya,  the term “tent” Khayma  is the same word meaning “family.” The first tents erected when the Sahrawi arrived in the harsh Hamada desert just across the border into Algeria, were made by the Sahrawi women using their own clothing Melhfa before the UNHCR provided more durable fabric to the refugee camps a few years later. The women designed the dwelling with entrances facing each of the four directions to offer protection from unpredictable desert sandstorms, which can approach from any angle. These multiple entrances also express the Sahrawi’s profound hospitality, welcoming anyone who is visiting from directions near and far. 

Sleiman Labat revisits this practice to share how intimate the tent architecture is and has always been. He collaborated with the women in his community who contributed their everyday clothes which make up the tent you are encountering here now. These vibrant fabrics you see and touch, convey the past, present, and future stories that are woven through them in terms of the closeness to the people who live in and with them. This tent here serves to spark conversation around global refugee issues such as what the Sahrawi community currently faces in a prolonged refugee situation in Southwestern Algeria.