The impossible cities

Between 1947 and 1949 the photographer based in the Canary Islands Bonifacio Hernández Gil made numerous photographs for the army and the colonial administration of the so-called Spanish West Africa. In his images appear new cities as scenes of science fiction movies, surrounded by the desert and half-empty, prepared to welcome the new man that the regime designed. Impossible cities that the film says from the present in the only possible way, as Calvino wrote: from the relations between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.

• history
• sahrawi refugee camps