New Morocco initiative to help gender equality through art

Moroccan illustrator Zainab Fasiki is hoping to promote gender equality in the country through an initiative dedicated to women who want to develop their skills in the art world.

The Jawjab collaborative space in Casablanca will host, each month, around 20 women who will benefit from a one-day training programme in different artistic disciplines around the theme of gender equality.

The programmes are set to start on 21 January with a video production on the theme of violence against women. Less than 24 hours after it was launched, the initiative, named “Women Power”, received close to 50 applications from women eager to join. Selected participants will then be able to improve their skills in filming, editing and script or storyboard writing.

Read: 6 women killed, 6,000 psychologically abused in Morocco in 2017

The training will then continue with a filming session where four groups will be formed to deal with the topic of violence in four different ways.

The experience will be repeated each month with a different artistic discipline such as theatre, dance and photography explored.

Through this initiative, Zainab Fasiki hopes to encourage women to embark on artistic careers and to have more women involved in this field where there is currently very little representation and to “fight patriarchy through art”.

The illustrator will also be launching her first comic book exploring the difficulties of a woman’s life in Morocco. In parallel with “Women Power”, Fasiki has also worked on a series of animation videos that deal with “taboo subjects in Moroccan society” such as when girls first begin to menstruate.

Women in Morocco have been fighting for safe public spaces and better rights for women following a string of harassment cases which gripped the country last year and have called on the government to do more to protect women.