Shooting Back: Photography and videomaking to confront the silencing of being locked up during the COVID-19 lockdown in the Rohingya Refugee Camps of Bangladesh.

Bangladesh hosts the world’s largest refugee camp in the Ukhiya district of Cox’s Bazar, a very beautiful but geopolitically sensitive and environmentally fragile coastal area. Kutupalong Camp is ‘home’ to almost one million Rohingyas who have fled Myanmar – their country – after various waves of violence. As UNHCR recently reported, in Cox’s Bazar “the COVID-19 pandemic has made life even harder for some 880,000 Rohingya refugees living in camps as well as for thousands of impoverished Bangladeshis living in nearby communities” (2021). This article is part of an ongoing research study on the strategies of material and symbolic survival and the ways images and narratives – together with silences and absences – are employed to create another public sphere where Rohingya refugees can talk as citizens of the world. Starting from the political and philosophical considerations drawn from Hannah Arendt (1943; 1973) and Giorgio Agamben (1995; 1998) works on refugees, this preliminary contribution looks at the artistic and visual strategies that Rohingyas have begun devising during the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic to cope with the increasingly daunting outcomes of forced displacement in the Bangladeshi camps of Cox’s Bazar.