DIVA ALERT! Boujloud Unmasked with Simomo’s curation

Picture this: a divine creature, half-human and half-beast, parading through the streets of Southern Morocco as a masked non-binary diva. This is Boujloud – literally “Person with many skins” – an ancient Islamic/indigenous ritual that follows the sacrifice of a sheep during Eid al-Adha. That has now evolved into a spectacular display where young people paint their faces, drape themselves in the skin of the ritually slaughtered animals and Indigenous jewellery, and quite simply, SERVE!

For curator Simomo Bouj, this ritual holds special significance as they grew up in both Belgium and Morocco, yet only recently discovered this tradition. The exhibition brings together ten artists who explore this plurality through various mediums – from Mounir Eddib‘s paintings incorporating actual goat skin,  and aromatic قطران (resin) to Spitler‘s embodiment of the ritual and Abu Shhab‘s highly charged digital performances. At the No Limits! Art Castle, a boundary-breaking space in the Dutch art scene, the exhibition doesn’t just showcase art – it stands for community. Simomo emphasises it’s “a show for the fam” demonstrating how North African traditions have always contained spaces for those who don’t fit neat categories.

It’s a pleasure to speak with you today! Boujloud Beats is a title with such rich cultural resonance. Could you share what inspired you to choose it for your exhibition?

Simomo: Boujloud is a tradition in Morocco, a ritual that happens every year after Eid al-Adha aka Eid al-Kabir. A year and a half ago, my career began connecting me to the Moroccan world, reflecting my Moroccan and Belgian identity. I had never encountered this ritual in my diaspora upbringing, which was surprising since it originated so close to my hometown in Morocco. I got to know more about Boujloud as I was working on this project – it’s my way of digging into a subject. I like to integrate my discoveries into my artistic practice, as my ADHD makes it difficult to discover something and then go to work. I cannot do things separately. 

Yes! Fascinating how you mention that you’re also uncovering what this journey means to you personally. It’s so nice that this experience is being shared with the Moroccan diaspora, allowing them to connect with it in a new way here. 

Simomo: Yes, the practice of making this happen is part of the delving into Boujloud for me. Some people go and find books at the library and read full encyclopaedias. I don’t read much, I listen a lot, look and discover more in dialogues with people. 

As a contributing artist to the exhibition, what feelings or ideas does the name evoke for you?

Abu Shhab: When Simomo explained the concept, I immediately thought of the literal translation of the word Boujloud, djild which means skin. Immediately I dug into my box of “things I’ve made” and found a lot of silicone sheets from previous projects because I’m interested in them for installations. Then, of course, my practice on TikTok had a lot of chaotic elements that we wanted to incorporate into the exhibition. Specifically, in the capacity that Boujloud represents is this friction or provocation, with a wider audience, whether in the street or online. 

Spitler: I have a similar experience of only recently hearing about it. I was drawn in because I make animalistic costumes intending to take the humanity out of the wearer. I really wanted to create something inspired by traditional costumes with more modern tools and include a performance with traditional Moroccan instruments. I’m also intrigued by the idea that Boujloud conceptually exists in places around the world without a definite connection to each other like in East Africa, Eastern Europe, and Southern Europe, in the use of animal skins, masks and music in rituals. That overlap has always fascinated me. Additionally a lot of the time, people from the diaspora don’t really get to know these obscure holidays. It’s almost as if we discover something brand new, which is actually quite ancient. It immediately made me want to create a costume myself. To fully participate, like they do there, feels essential—the knowledge comes from truly embodying the ritual.

Embodying your work sounds beautiful! Mounir Eddib, we also want to hear your thoughts on the exhibition’s theme?

Mounir: When this opportunity came up, I felt this urgent need to go to the studio. I was thinking about how to participate as a painter and create something around Boujloud so I made three paintings that are about skin and what skin is. It has a lot to do with the fact that I was in Morocco and I bought the skin of a goat to take with me which I used elements from in my paintings.

Simomo:  I like your work and the specific ingredients you use cause they have strong symbolic power. You really manage to ask some super interesting questions about the worth of the skin by incorporating it and through the use of smell with the قطران (resin) you use making the entire space smell like that. 

Mounir: I think materials have potentiality. قطران (resin) is often used in rituals in Morocco to free yourself in a world full of constructions. These layers of meaning are important in things.

And it’s captivating because it transforms the whole exhibition into a rich sensory experience.

Simomo: Many senses are coming together yes, like performative visual arts, which is what I really like about Abu Shhab. I loved their style because it’s one of their expressions. I think it’s art and their TikTok too. We’ve worked together many times, but this time I came with a more specific demand: Can you please find a way to tie all these worlds you exist in together? Because I always recognized them being exhibited as separate. I asked Abu Shhab to style an art piece made by another artist Carly Everaert. And then I started to realise that Abu Shhab already had all the elements for this collaboration, it felt like the universe just needed this to happen.

Abu Shhab: Even up until this moment while we’re building up, the right elements are constantly falling in place. 

Simomo: This encounter of “the next step” is also part of practising this ritual— where you discover, go into a trance, a momentum and celebrate the thing that comes out of the unknown parts in you. It resonates with my Amazigh way of being. It’s just playing but also not, it’s not just like a carnival but at the same time, it could be. Carnival is like I’m going to be Vendetta or Freddy Krueger for example. But with Boujloud it’s more of an embodiment than an image but then again also not.

You’ve already touched on another question I had in mind— which was the role of TikTok creators blending with more traditional art spaces, like exhibitions or galleries as a curator but from the artist’s perspective Abu—your online work possesses a kind of trolling nature. How would you describe the concept to someone unfamiliar with it?

Abu Shhab: It’s specifically debate trolling, it’s a practice that I built in the past two years on TikTok. I built a platform of haters, I had 30,000 followers and almost all of them were following me to bully me. I would talk to them on live streams and they would try to debate my right to exist as a queer person, specifically in Arabic. That’s when I started trolling because I didn’t want to give them the opportunity and the privilege of deciding who gets to exist or not. Then I started getting really good at it.

Yeah! The comebacks are so snappy, we love it.

Abu Shhab: It became addictive because as a performer, I love improv as well. I was really exhilarated by the experience of having a conversation in Arabic with a homophobe because if it were to happen back home irl you would immediately take yourself out of the situation. It would be too dangerous but this is an opportunity to create a space of debate, where we usually end up yelling at each other, but that in itself is really healing. Multiple factors kept me going, and although it became really threatening at some points, the outcome is interesting to me both as an artist and an Arabic-speaking queer person. Troll debating is basically the same concept as debating but instead of getting someone to agree with you, you allow vulgar language and slurs, you allow crying, you allow screaming and all the things that are not civil enough for a debate. That’s where you start eventually trolling each other into an emotional expression. 

Because you’re stepping into territory that’s much more emotional, something deeply personal and meaningful to these people.

Abu Shhab: Yeah. I made rules for myself. I would never stop them no matter how violent and hateful they get. For most of them, this is the first time they talk to a queer person who is not telling them you are right or wrong, that is irrelevant in our conversation. Like when they say: I want to kill you. I reply with: what knife? I don’t ask why they want to kill me or argue with them. So I say: You want to kill me. Okay. Let’s go into it. How are you going to do it? And what part of my body are you going to stab first? I basically go as crazy as they do.

It’s fascinating how you reflect people’s attitudes back to them. Seeing you match their energy is so refreshing.

Abu Shhab: You know when you face violence, they say fight or flight. I coined the third one which is flirt. Flirting with violence is its own practice because I’ve endured so much fleeing from war in Syria. You kind of have to invent new ways to process violence and on TikTok, it ended up with flirting.

The way you’ve transformed trauma response into this ‘flirt’ response is incredible. You mentioned earlier how trolling started organically for you, what was the spark that kept you developing this idea?

Abu Shhab: The fact that I escaped Syria, Aleppo specifically, when I was 16 just as I was entering queer spaces. I had to flee alone so I didn’t get the chance to develop my queer lingo, my queer identity in Arabic through community and other queer people. So I shocked myself with homophobes basically because I never realised how queer I was until I started talking to them. They are always mind-blown in the videos, but I’m as mind-blown too. If I ever want to sit down and write a scenario or a dialogue between two crazy people, I would never be able to reach this level. I have hours and hours of live streams stored because the material in there is so valuable. Although in the beginning, I really had to protect myself, because it got to disturbing levels. There was a specific one that made me go off TikTok for like three weeks. It hit me so hard. But I like to believe that in the context of a bigger picture, as an artist, you have to take risks.

You should definitely coin the term “trolling practice.” It truly fits your journey.

Abu Shhab: Yes! People also say you have two options: you’re either an educator or a troll, but you cannot be both. Especially when it comes to social issues, or fighting for justice, you either educate people or you troll them. You don’t have any other options. You can never take it seriously and that’s part of Syrian culture. There’s a Syrian nihilism in there where people are like, yeah, whatever. After 11 years of war, who cares who bombed us? There’s a nihilism to it that makes you not give a fuck. 

Fascinating from even a sociological standpoint. We can only imagine that there are phrases you’ve heard that have never been uttered in the history of the world.

Abu Shhab: I can immediately think of one. There’s this guy who once said: I wanna fuck you. And then I said: Oh, so you are queer? And he replied with: No, no, no. I don’t want fuck you because I’m attracted to you. I wanna fuck you because I wanna expose your honour. And that shook me, I was like:… How? What about your honour? Cause you’re the fucker. 

That’s a crazy thing to say, how does one even begin to twist that around?

Abu Shhab: He was so confident. He said it like it meant something. There are very interesting things being said because they are really going through it.

The concept of honour carries significant weight in Syria, doesn’t it?

Abu Shhab: It means a lot. The perception of femininity and queerness are rooted in misogyny so you have to protect your honour as a man. Syrians want me to lie and not say I’m Syrian because just by existing I insult their honour. That’s why I did the honour metre. It was an improv moment where I was like: okay, let’s measure everybody’s honour. I made these fake screens that will measure your honour according to your voice and how masculine you are. All of them had zero honour and they went crazy and believed the device worked.

It’s quite remarkable how you’ve integrated your visual arts skills into this performance. How did you go about programming or creating the device?

Abu Shhab: On Instagram story, it was a bunch of stickers on top of each other. You know the 0%? That’s just a sticker on Instagram. I showed them the device showing you have 0% honour. I told them that the doctor gave me the device because I have no honour as a queer person and I need to find honourable people. And the whole stream was me telling all these people that none of them have honour. And I cannot find honour.

The quest for honour continues. Do you think that some of the individuals sending you all that hate might be feeling a sense of jealousy? Jealousy that you’re living your life on your own terms?

Abu Shhab: A lot of them actually come out on the live and say: maybe… I want to do this. But I want to punch you in the face. That’s what I like about the live, is the space I create for them so they can go through it and I can watch and laugh. But it is real. I don’t care to change their mind as much as I’m using them as a prop for the performance. And then whatever they take out of it, they take out of it. Because they pay to go on.

That’s the most intriguing aspect—that they’re paying to insult you in that space.

Abu Shhab: The way it works is that on TikTok stream you can send gifts that are money. Sometimes it’s just a couple of cents. But I tell them, you are not allowed as a guest unless you’re at the top of the list. And to get on top of the list, you have to send the most gifts.

You found a way to monetize the hate. Genius

Abu Shhab: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One live I made 200 euros in two hours. Sometimes it gets funny. It gets nice. It’s just symbolic that they have to pay to do this to have financial dominance. 

Back to Simomo’s work as a curator, what role do you envision community engagement playing in this exhibition?

Simomo: I wanted to connect with the community, we are all artists and we are the odd duck in our family. So I got the desire to make this work for our not chosen family too. I wanted them to recognize that normality doesn’t exist anywhere—not even in our own indigenous lands. Queerness is everywhere and unfortunately hijacked by the West. That makes it that when you are weird or different from our families, they think it’s because you’re westernised or you became one of them. Showing off these artists and the richness hiding in the rituals created by our ancestors we confirm that our creativeness and queerness have kept us much closer to our culture than most might give us credit for. 

You’re actively building a community by doing this—bringing together people with a SWANA background who don’t fit the stereotypes. You’re also investing in a cross-pollination of ideas among artists.

Simomo: Yeah. The gathering for me is a big part of the work. I select artists that I want to work with, not the art pieces. If we have a good work ethic and work relation, then I trust what the art needs to be what it becomes. I do this mostly because as a dancer. My language is movement and I only know how to work in this way. As a choreographer, you work with the person doing the dance. The art is a result of the relationship we share during the creation period. I try to make a parallel when working in the visual arts.

Who do you envision as the ideal audience for this exhibition, especially considering the diverse backgrounds of the artists?

Simomo: When I think about the attendees, I want to create an environment where everyone from aunties to queer youth can come and create that friction of like, ooh, ooh. That’s why sometimes people need to deal with weird things. I get happy when my parties not only attract that straight shirtless white dude who is sweating but also my hijabi aunties with their kids and babies. When I see them dance together and not judge one another I get goosebumps. Back when I was young it was always that sister-friend with the hijabi that was my bestie. They were always the funniest and the most loving. Now that I’ve become louder and create fun spaces, I still want my sisters to be here. 

Abu Shhab: I’ve always dreamt of hosting a queer party at a shisha bar!

Yeah! Those were all the questions, thank you so much for your openness in sharing your experiences! It’s been such a pleasure and a privilege learning more about your work. We look forward to seeing how this exhibition continues to evolve!

Simomo: Thank you for having us! I truly enjoyed our conversation, I’m excited for what lies ahead and can’t wait to see everyone at the exhibition. Take care!

Abu Shhab: Thank you for having me!