New Archetypes: Ahmad Swaid on flipping the script on iconography

“I’ve seen footage.

What’s that? Can’t tell…

I stay noided, stimulation overload account for it

Desensitised by the mass amounts of shit.”

[Death Grips, The Money Store, 2012]

Is it just me, or are we all trapped in a collective brain-rot? Doomscrolling through the uncanny valley of what-the-actual-f*ck, vibrating between existential dread and endless Ocean Spray hope-core, we’ve become prisoners of our own content-fuelled making. The word ‘era’ no longer marks a historical moment—it’s a branding tool for our ego-driven transformations. As people online declare they’ve entered their “villain era” – an attempt to reclaim agency as an actual villain rage-baits the rest of us with an AI-generated spectacle to remodel Gaza – no caption deemed necessary.

In today’s grand theatre of image-making, who controls how we see ourselves in a society transcending beyond the screen? Social movements become commodified for the masses in the same way that subgenres of music once became mainstream. Critical thinking has become distilled into a slogan tee that can be bought at non-profits. Want to be real? You can now pay to be via a verification subscription service being offered by Meta. Is rebellion the only antidote, even when it is at risk of becoming another aesthetic? As the fake becomes disturbingly real, and the real feels like a distant truth, do the images we surround ourselves with ultimately reflect our (-core) selves?

The human condition drives us to seek meaning in everything. Maybe that’s why astrology has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar industry. I’ve had more conversations in recent years about the influence of a new blood moon on our psyche as much as the actual politics shaping our realities. Mercury in retrograde has become shorthand for explaining the chaos we refuse to name. The symbols we once believed in are now in crisis. If meaning is in collapse, what truths can emerge from the mayhem?

The iconography I consumed growing up, mostly from this fantasy world I understood as America, felt like an alternate reality at that time, archived on my VCR and ripped out of the magazines I would read to the music I would blast. As those mythologies fade, what exists behind the curtain?

Before we even began Issue 00, I already knew what Issue 01 would be about: an attempt to canonise and question the meaning we give in today’s sociocultural, pop-driven landscape. From there, it made sense to bring together a specific round-up of esteemed artists: Mohamed Bourouissa, Bilal El-Kadhi, Ilyes Griyeb, Pegah Farahmand, Daniel Arnold, Chndy, Abdulhamid Kircher and more. Taken together, their body of work, in many ways, observes and questions how we perceive the world around us.

It’s also why we explore the grand narrative and most iconographic protagonist of all– Egypt – through the lens of artist Pegah Farahmand and Fashion Director Omaima Salem. Clad in a Duran Lantink dress reminiscent of taxi-seat covers across North Africa, Nora Attal becomes a living vitrine, echoing the sculptural language of Adam Henein—canonised in Fady Nageeb’s “Eternally Vanishing”. Elsewhere, you’ll see how flags, the ultimate symbols of ideology, now carry conflicted meanings—from the de facto Syrian flag (which doesn’t even have an emoji in real-time) to the Star-Spangled Banner, once a symbol of ‘freedom’, now resistant to change. And how, under global surveillance, the Sudanese and Palestinian flags hold more power for those who need liberation the most. Our future understanding of the world is shaped by those who have preserved its past.

Take Akram Zaatari, whose practice interrogates the authority of who gets to define
collective history. “There is no differentiation between a photograph, picture, and image;
they are all the same word, sūrah,” he tells Taous Dahmani. That same instinct drives the
making of Robin Nazari, one half of Biji. Shot in Sweden by Abdulhamid Kircher – whose
recent book, Rotting from Within, is an ode to observation and intimacy – this duo reclaim
the ancient culture of Kurdistan through hip-hop. Images here are ultimately about love as
much as they are about power.

Elsewhere, a cultural figure who has much ruptured the status quo, embodying our time, graces one of our several covers. Willy Chavarria is one such figure. On 25 January, he staged his first Paris Fashion Week show, setting the internet ablaze. In the lead-up, cryptic teasers dubbed ‘Tarantula’ flooded across social media. Two days later, he was in a studio, coiled by a python, Paloma Elsesser at his side, photographed by Illyes Griyeb for the cover of this very magazine. Like those before him, the designer uses fashion as a mirror for the upending and falling stars of Americana. Against the powers of the global North erasing immigration and identity, his rise feels urgent. Necessary.

No one feels more urgent, more necessary, than Mohammed El-Kurd. The Palestinian
poet and writer doesn’t just reflect the zeitgeist. He is the zeitgeist. I remember the first time we met at an Italian spot in Hell’s Kitchen two years ago. Nothing, and no one, is more punk than El-Kurd. An instigator and real-life Neo whose body of work, in one way or the other, has been about dismantling the spectacle and resurrecting truth.

This is ultimately an issue about and for those who refuse to accept the world at face value, and it was created by a team and contributors who question history as we are living through it and what we ultimately choose to believe in. To echo El-Kurd: “There will always be injustice, you know?If I don’t believe in that, then what’s the point?” Welcome to Issue One.