Sahara Chronicle – Agadez

The desert city of Agadez, at the heart of Niger, is the gate to the Saharan basin for the main routes coming from West Africa, and capital of the cross-border Tuareg tribes. Places that we have never heard of have emerged as crucial nodes in the international migration and resource-distribution network. With large uranium deposits discovered in the 1960s, this desert area has gained strategic importance. More recently, we witness a large-scale geographic reconfiguration activated by the growing and highly flexible practices of migration, proficient at rerouting, reorganizing or going covert in record time. With the increasing volume of trans-Saharan mobility, Agadez has become a hub for migration traffic of international dimensions, a continental dispatch center. While migration is the prevailing mode of mobility, it is not an isolated phenomenon. In the Saharan basin, migration flows intersect with other forms of organized mobility such as seasonal nomadic movements, tourism, roaming martial formations including rebel or terrorist groups, commuting uranium miners and engineers, the temporary appearance of migration-related humanitarian personnel and, not least, the writers, journalists and image-makers like myself, who strive for making sense of it all. The conjunction of these movements generates synergies, conflicts and sometimes surprising alliances, which are the subject of the video project Sahara Chronicle.

Overview of all projects & their locations