In our latest podcast episode, young Moroccan researcher Soufiane Chinig tells us about his PhD research: 'Writing on Kingdom Walls: Practices, Narratives and visual politics of graffiti and street art in Jordan and Morocco'.
Chinig presents a comparative study on cultural practices and narratives related to art production and its entanglement with resistance and visual politics in North Africa and the Middle East. By working on Morocco and Jordan, he focuses on wall-writings, street art, and graffiti to understand how these practices contribute to public expression and how they reveal sociocultural transformations.
Chinig addresses three mains questions:
1) What kind of social experiences can be shared through the practices of wall-writings and mural paintings in Jordan and Morocco?
2) How do the practices of wall-writings and murals painting coexist with the legal framework and prevailing national narratives in both countries? This aspect of the research draws attention to the ways in which wall writings and murals painting contribute to reclaim ownership of the public space. It also highlights its significance as a spatial poetics (under authoritarianism).
3) How graffiti writers and painters express the Maghreb and the Mashreq (North Africa and the Middle East)? How do these practices deterritorialise and re-territorialise the geographical boundaries between North Africa
and the Middle East?
Download our podcast episode for free via the Zip folder below.
This episode was recorded and edited by Emily Primmer Pyke.