Our special guest Mohamed Sleiman Labat is joined by one of our featured speakers, Ali Akbar Mehta, in a conversation again curated and moderated by Ines Montalvao from AwE. In this session, participants are joining us from various locations such as Munich, Michigan, Abu Dhabi, New York, Nairobi, Helsinki, Portugal and Toronto to name a few. In this session, Labat discusses how art and farming bring hope and resilience to the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria. We discover how his creative projects, such as desert farming and preserving oral traditions, help his community face environmental and social challenges. Our guest is joined by featured speaker Ali Akbar Mehta, for the 5th discussion of the series Ec(h)o Effect: Conversations on War & Environment, curated and moderated by Ines Montalvao, Program Director at AwE. Mohamed Sleiman Labat is a Sahrawi multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer & translator. Born and raised in the Sahrawi refugee camps southwest Algeria. He now runs Motif Art Studio; a small art space built entirely from discarded materials following destructive floods that hit the refugee camps in Tindouf in 2015. He has been investigating the multi-layered political, environmental and social issues affecting the Sahrawi people in the desert and the world at large across multiple disciplines, including films, writing and community-based art. He also works on preserving the oral knowledge and traditions of the Sahrawi people. He documents Sahrawi poems, stories, interviews, testimonies and narrations such as the Nomadic Calendar. Labat also experiments with local food production, following the emerging phenomenon of small-scale family gardens in his community in the Hamada Desert to address issues of food security, environmental change and community resilience. Labat exhibited internationally and is the recipient of multiple awards, grants and residencies Enjoy this insightful conversation on turning the harsh desert into a space of hope and regeneration! If you missed this and previous conversations, you can now watch it here in our Youtube channel @ArtistswithEvidenceAwE This series of conversations is funded by the Nordic Culture Fund who awarded Artists with Evidence with the Globus Opstart grant for 2024.