MATARR

When Matarr left The Gambia in 2015, his tiny country was still under a vicious dictatorship. Yahya Jammeh, one of the longest-serving autocrats on the planet, brutally attached to power won in a 1994 coup, had made Gambia a kind of open-air prison where political opponents, activists, and homosexuals risked enforced disappearance or death.

From this small, impoverished and liberticidal state tucked inside Senegal, masses of young people were fleeing.

“I made the classic stops: Mali, Burkina Faso then Niger and Agadez, on the border with Algeria, where all the migrants pass through. Then Libya, where we were slaughtered, sold to traffickers and then locked in prisons.”

But the sea journey, for Matarr, is a worse ordeal than the camps. “My friend, the one who had convinced me to leave with him to seek a better future, died at sea.”

Matarr, after years still unable to grieve, still experiences his own post-traumatic stress.

He has worked at Gallerie delle Prigioni, the exhibition space of Fondazione Imago Mundi, as a museum watchman since 2018. (For news of his professionalism, please see the visitor logs from 2018 ).