Documents 18. Skefkef Magazine

A Commons Publication from the Maghreb

Friday, 2 July 2021 - 6pm
Admission

Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on July 1. A maximum of 2 per person

Place
Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
Capacity:

20 people

Organised by:

Museo Reina Sofía, Casa Árabe and Medialab Prado

With the collaboration of:

illycaffè

Programme:

Documents

Force-line:

Action and Radical Imagination

Inside the framework of:

In the Meantime

Related links:

Skefkef

Related exhibition:

Moroccan Trilogy 1950–2020

The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. This new edition, an encounter, centres on Skefkef, an independent comic/magazine for adults that was created in 2013 in Casablanca and examines the social and cultural sides of contemporary Morocco via drawings, illustrations and satirical texts, and comprises a conversation with Salah Malouli, a founding member of the publication, and a visual and thematic analysis of the magazine’s different editions. 

The magazine’s name is a reference to a popular sandwich in Casablanca known as skefkef, meaning tasty but unhealthy, and serves as a satirical metaphor of a city that is well loved, despite everything. Just like these sandwiches, the publication vindicates the popular and the subversive, focusing on issues that provoke reactions in Moroccan society. This session analyses how the magazine’s sudden emergence in the local cultural landscape has grouped together and brought to the fore a generation of artists outside the Moroccan artistic milieu, for instance Salahhedine Basti and Rebel Spirit. Moreover, it analyses and debates the magazine’s working model, based on self-management, self-funding and a culture of the commons as a process for producing an independent and popular periodical publication.       

The encounter ties in with Artivism and the Female Body, a fanzine workshop conducted by Zainab Fasiki in the framework of the programme In the Meantime held in the Museo. Fasiki published her comic The Conspiracy in Skefkef, signalling the start of her public activism. In 2018, she created Hshouma (Taboo), a website and comic on taboos in Moroccan society with a significant social and media impact in her country.

Participants:
Salah Malouli (Casablanca, 1978), is a cultural producer, translator and independent researcher specialised in developing projects that explore the connections between art, digital culture and cultural activism. He is currently the director of two public-space art festivals in Morocco: the Sbagha Bagha Casablanca Street Art Festival, since 2013, and the Jidar Rabat Street Art Festival, since 2015, and is also a founding member of Skefkef and the comic fanzine Golojamzine. In 2015, he curated the project Rosoum. Strategies for an Independent Arab Comic, inside the framework of the programme Barcelona Producció, La Capella.