© Jana Traboulsi
Xabaca seeks to help empower female Arab artists as a source of social transformation and defense of Human Rights. To achieve this aim, the Xabaca project will be structured into two different areas:
(1) Artistic development: to enhance art and creativity as means to combat gender discrimination, censorship and social injustice. This will be achieved by helping empower artistic process of four female Arab artists staying at Jiwar (Barcelona) for 1 month. Jiwar is an organization which offers stays for artists and has its own center.
(2) Empowering activist aspects: to strengthen the capacities of the four female Arab artists to increase their role in social change. This will be done by participation in workshops and in an international support network which will begin when they start their artistic residency and will continue when they go back to their home countries.
Xabaca was born from the collaboration of Novact, Al Fanar and Jiwar. It wants to support female Arab creators for two reasons: their role in social transformation through art and for the double oppression they face for being artists and women. Very often, cultural creation is a tool to visualize and cross red lines of power structures and facilitates the questioning of the status quo. Precisely because of these capacities sometimes the authorities see many women artists as a threat, which often violate their basic Human Rights such as freedom of expression.
Female creators face a very specific type of repression. Patriarchy and the defiance towards the status quo generate a particular form of restraint which affects women in a different way than it affects men. On the other hand women may suffer stronger and harder consequences than male artists by their artistic expressions. The public and the political role of female creators is reduced, by minimizing the distribution, exposure and advocacy of their products.
Xabaca puts forward the realization of artistic works linked to this whole context, taking into account the importance of gender and repression as fundamental aspects of the defense of freedom of expression and free creation of female Arab artists.
The first step of the project is this open call for four female artists living and working in Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon and Palestine. We have chosen these four countries for their importance in cultural and artistic aspects, and because they represent the two geographical areas of the Arab World: Magreb and Mashrek. It is a call to all the disciplines (visual arts, literature, music, performance, etc.).
