DARF

As long as I can remember, art has always occupied an important place in my life. I always loved drawing and never stopped, with a deep fascination for comics and the fact that you can create a whole universe with only a piece of paper and a pencil. My dream has always been to become an illustrator. When I was in high school, I had to make a choice about my professional future. I was dealing with a lot of remarks from people who told me that this future was impossible and uncertain. But the young Tunisian girl who was always reading books and imagining images and characters could not accept that. At the same time, I felt that I should listen to the adults, so I put all my dreams aside and turned to 2D and 3D animation. There, I found a part of my passion, but in the end, something was missing, something more important than anything else: the freedom to draw anything I want, to explore new forms, new colors, anatomy, and backgrounds, to learn, to fail, and to start again. This dream never abandoned me. For a long time, I never dared to create because I thought my work was never going to be good enough. I limited myself, without the courage to experiment with the potential of my imagination. Today, I decided not to repress it anymore. I want to reconnect with the passion of my childhood, the one that made me put all my drawings on the walls, the one that made me draw nonstop and see my dad with his “oh no, not again” face. And most importantly, I want to share it. I want to create images that kids, teenagers, and adults can relate to, to share a little piece of my mind through my style and my vision of the world.

I planned to share an artbook, a mix of all of my drawings in a kind of same universe, as an inspiration, a sharing of my vision.The format is gonna be A4 21x29,7cm

In my opinion, the earliest forms of sharing knowledge or life perspectives were done through art or through many physical works. People shared books, discussed the relevance of certain statements, and underlined important or impactful pages for them. Showing something visually that we can touch, feel, observe, and scrutinize in detail is something unique when it exists physically. Presenting something physically like a book seems to me more concrete and more rewarding than something online, something I cannot touch, something I cannot proudly display. I want to give myself this opportunity to say that I am in someone’s library, and that whenever this person lacks inspiration or wishes to escape, they can do so through the smell of the book, the visuals, and the feeling of moving from one image to another with a simple brush of the fingers.

Bringing my publication to a place like Iga, where books do not usually arrive, is a way of taking the book out of its usual circuits. For me, this gesture expresses the desire to create a meeting where none was planned, to make the book exist in a more unexpected space, perhaps a quieter one, but also a more authentic one. It is also a way of reminding us that ideas should not remain confined to places already used to receiving them. Moving them means giving them another life, another possible way of being heard.