The Ek Khaale visual restoration project was started by documentary photographer Greg Constantine and the Rohingya community in 2020. Ek Khaale means “Once Upon a Time” in the Rohingya language. It was launched in collaboration with Rohingya living inside Burma, as well as in the Bangladesh refugee camps, and the diaspora living in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Malaysia and Europe.
“It took a year of basically sifting through, analyzing, deconstructing this huge, massive block of raw materials that had been collected through and contributed by the Rohingya and that I had found in archives. Then [I tried] to chisel away at it to try to tell a narrative. And that’s how these nine chapters of the project were constructed to show different slices of time. And using the different visual materials that we had found,” he told DVB.
Constantine has been documenting and photographing the persecution faced by the Rohingya in Burma since 2006. Ek Khaale is a storytelling project and historical narrative that counters the disinformation spread by successive military regimes about the Rohingya community in northern Arakan State, where the U.N. cites that 630,000 of them live without access to citizenship and freedom of movement.
The Ek Khaale Rohingya visual restoration project was on display at the Rohingya Cultural Night held by the Rohingya Maiyafuinor Collaborative Network women’s group in Chiang Mai, Thailand on Sept. 8.
