Story

Motivation Behind The Art

My practice explores identity, belonging, trauma, and the experience of existing between cultural spaces. Growing up between Swiss and Moroccan cultural environments, I became familiar with the feeling of belonging to more than one place while never being entirely reduced to either. Growing up between two cultures means experiencing and exploring your strengths and weaknesses in different ways. How you face them and integrate them into your life is the big challenge. For me, this resulted in childhood trauma in one way or another. Expressing myself through art helps me cope with these experiences. I translate this tension into fragmented faces, masks, and hybrid figures. I work intuitively, moving between canvas, cardboard, and the digital screen. Acrylic, oil pastel, mixed media, and drawing become tools for a process in which the image is discovered through the act of making rather than fixed in advance. Continuous lines, layered colour, and spontaneous gestures allow forms to emerge, shift, and remain unresolved. The resulting figures exist between recognition and ambiguity. A face can become a character, a mask can become a feeling, and a rough surface can carry as much presence as a polished one. Self-acceptance is therefore both a method and a subject: whatever appears is given permission to exist. For me, painting is not a way of representing identity as something fixed. It is a space in which identity can remain open, contradictory, and unfinished. In a reality where one can feel like a stranger everywhere, art becomes the place where I belong.