Mohamed Sqalli: Pushing postcolonial storytelling

Mohamed Sqalli grew up in Casablanca, where his early fixations on music, cinema, and design hinted at a future spent bridging cultural identities through art. He’s now splitting time between his home city and Paris, where he works as a creative director for artists like Lace &ce, Laylow, Dinos, and Marina Satti. He is also the co-founder of NAAR, an independent collective empowering artists to challenge the inequities of the global creative industry, as well as WAR Entertainment, an independent Moroccan label fostering local talent and innovation.

Mohamed’s work is inextricably bound to themes of heritage, identity, and decolonisation. Rooted in Morocco’s avant-garde post-independence movements, his creative approach is intent on reenvisioning vernacular traditions through a modern lens. Be it on a music video set in the Cameroonian jungle or shooting a Moroccan short film laced with mythology, Mohamed hinges North African culture on an entirely new frame. Here, Mohamed Sqalli speaks to Dazed MENA about decolonising visual narratives, reimagining Moroccan creative expression, and fostering a future where North African creativity thrives on its own terms. 

DAZED MENA: Talk to us about the NAAR collective!

MOHAMED SQALLI: I created it with my friend Ilyas Griyeb. It was important because it was a 360 project, including music, videos, tour…it had a strong political angle and purpose. First and foremost, it was done entirely by us, without any external pressure or condescending industry influence that I had experienced a lot before. It brought a lot of attention to the Moroccan trap movement, allowing the development of a strong local economy. Also, visually, Ilyes’ work as a photographer and director in that project reshaped how a whole generation of young creatives in the region showed themselves and their countries. 

DAZED MENA: What influences inform your vision?

MOHAMED SQALLI: I really believe that the main blessing I benefited from by working with music artists is the huge impact on the youth. I think the most recurring thing in my work is my will to decolonise images shot in countries in the Global South. Whether it’s in Morocco, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, or Greece, I always tried to come up with concepts and visual decisions that would go in reverse of the images that the West installed in people’s brains globally, during the colonial era—through documentary, news, and works in anthropology—and the postcolonial era, through the dominating entertainment industry that they built after WWII.

For instance, in the project I did this year in Cameroon with French-Cameroonian artist Dinos, we decided to shoot images in the jungle with both a thermal camera and a modern digital camera. I really wanted the video to look surreal, gloomy, and technological. Also [I wanted it to be] an opposition to how West Africa has been represented in Western popular culture in the last century: miserable, sunny, and unreasonably joyful and optimistic. I really plead for the use of genre while creating in the Global South, because it creates cultural depth.

DAZED MENA: How do you draw from your Moroccan roots in your work?

MOHAMED SQALLI: Growing up in Morocco in the 90s and 2000s was an experience marked with a lot of contradictions, especially on the cultural side. Like any country growing up close to a giant cultural influence—in our case, Europe—we tended to follow this paradigm in which our local traditional culture is considered archaic and reducing, as opposed to Western culture that is considered modern and competitive.

During my 20s spent in Paris, I went diving through so many works, especially the avant-garde Moroccan creative scene from the 70s—Nass El Ghiwane, Tayeb Seddiki, Revue Souffles, l’ecole de Casablanca, Moroccan brutalism, etc… They brought me to understand that it is actually the opposite. The first Moroccan creatives post-independence had to determine what modern Moroccan creative expression was, and that meant skipping the colonial episode; diving into the roots of vernacular, ritual, and ceremonial, taking rural Moroccan inspiration and transforming them into contemporary, universal works of art–it is exactly what I am trying to pursue in all of my works.

DAZED MENA: How do you hope to see the creative and cultural scene in Southwest Asia and North Africa evolve in the next few years?

MOHAMED SQALLI: The more specific the better. We have been at a dead angle in mainstream culture for so long due to colonialism that it is now a duty for us to use our cultural heritage as a fuel for creativity. Every piece we create needs to be culturally relevant, effective in an entertainment context, and strong in terms of the execution. There is a sentence from Larbi Batma that says “7na qlal, achnou fina ma it9sem?” or “there’s so few of us, what’s to divide from us?” And I really believe that. There aren’t so many people from the region who are in strong positions to be creative, so we hold a responsibility in terms of relevance and impact. 

DAZED MENA: What would you like to see yourself ultimately achieving with your practice?

MOHAMED SQALLI: My aim is always to try and make Moroccan and Global South culture as competitive as possible on the global cultural stage. It is the best way to stop the haemorrhage of our culture being used randomly in pointless Western advertising or fashion editorials. I also think it is the first step for us to tell our stories truly and stop being considered as collateral damage, both culturally and politically.

DAZED MENA: What upcoming projects are you working on?

MOHAMED SQALLI: I wrote two short films I want to produce next year. There are also a couple of international projects I started working on as a creative director.