I met Malika over a question. I was consumed by the idea that people who do really great things, do so because they ask great questions. I shared this thought in a virtual social networking group and Malika chimed in - As artists, this is exactly how we work. We seek to ask questions only the individual viewer or consumer can answer. if the question is answered, the piece loses interest for us.
In this episode we discuss
Born in Morocco to Austrian and Moroccan parents, Malika is a visual artist and photographer, who cites her diversity curiosity and connectedness as inspirations for her work.
Having lived in various countries, without her family from an early age, she identifies with a feeling of belonging to everywhere, and being the foreigner as well. She learned to exploit this polarity in her art and photography, creating different mosaics of culture and a universal perspective, shaped by her natural optimism and hope.
Her travels and work have taught her to seek the similarities, common wisdom, and shared mythologies of the ancestors, rather than the differences and boundaries that disconnect us.
Malika’s work has been exhibited on four continents, and in cities as diverse as London, Marrakech, Los Angeles, and Seoul. In 2013 she also delivered a masterful TedX talk on her travel along the latitude line 34.
Malika was also a qualified personal trainer and holistic lifestyle coach Kettlebell athlete for a decade in London. She is also a fully licensed skydiver and skydiving camerawoman and created a personal photography project while in the sky.
” we are made of Atoms, ideas and stories, for if we don’t act on our ideas they don’t become stories. “ Malika Sqalli TEDx Casablanca 2013
To view Malika's work, you can access it here
Katherine Byam 0:02
Malika, I'm sure all of my listeners are dying to meet you. Welcome to Where Ideas Launch.
Malika Sqalli 2:31
Hi, Katherine. Thank you for having me.
Katherine Byam 2:34
So I wanted to get you online because I know that you can teach my listeners a great deal about creativity. You have such a colourful backstory. You were born in Marrakech, your father is Moroccan, your mother's Austrian, you've lived in London, you lived in LA, you lived in Paris, and now you live in Battersea in Austria. Tell us about what those cultural experiences have brought to your life.
Malika Sqalli 3:04
So being from a mixed cultural background already teaches me that there are many ways of approaching life There are many ways of thinking there are many rules from one country and the other. And it showed me that nobody has the ultimate answer. It's just that some answers work better for some and some not so well. And it resulted in the feeling of belonging anywhere and everywhere, and nowhere at the same time. So for me, often being on the road is where I feel at home, going somewhere, I don't know. And so yeah, I'm quite lucky to have been able to, to feel more global, and not get stuck into who's right and wrong.
Katherine Byam 4:03
Let's get into this idea of how cultural diversity adds to your art. So you're an artist, and you've worked in very varied, places in the art are very varied types of arts. Tell us about where you've worked and what cultural diversity is brought to those elements.
Malika Sqalli 4:23
That's interesting. I had never made the connection between my diverse background and the different tools that I use in my work. That's interesting, because, indeed, I've used installation work, I've made embroideries on photos, I've had instant sculptures and made little animations. Lately, I've used photography a lot. And I've also painted on photography on photographs. So I've used the tools that fitted my message like a vocabulary. I've worked with more abstract concepts, and I've also worked with indigenous cultures, where, in fact, we go back to the topic of belonging and identity. I was fascinated, but by cultures that wear their identity on their face through facial tattoos, and this probably really spoke to me because I don't have this feeling of belonging to one culture. So that was, that was also very enriching to see people who have this sense of identity and roots and are prepared to wear it on their face,
Katherine Byam 5:44
I get excited every time we start talking about art and your cultural experiences. So we also talked about the mountains a lot. You tell me that you you love going up to the mountains and taking a call dip in a lake, I can't imagine what that's like, it's not something that I do. But tell our listeners what this means for your work, and how you're able to use this as part of your creative drive.
Malika Sqalli 6:12
Okay, so this is a big mountain to climb actually, and this is a big topic. And I have discovered the mountains quite late actually. And, and it came from a frustration that I had, and that I wanted to feel things a lot more. And I will start by saying that. For me my artworks, I don't see them as something visual, but I see them as something that needs to instigate emotions. I want people to feel something not to see something. And I was a fitness coach for a long time I did boxing and kettlebells so I was very incarnated.
And I needed to find another way to incarnate myself in my work. So the mountains to me are multi-faceted they are big metaphors of life. Because in life, I think we climb mountains, we go down, climb again, we go down, we go to valleys gorges, we stay up for a while, and nobody likes to go down. And it's a bit like that. It's one of the best metaphors I think we have for life. And climbing mountains is also learning the right to be old. It's earning the landscape. It's timing it, it's taming it, because when we drive, and I had just done a long project, driving, just before I started learning about discovering the mountains, all this travelling that we do with planes and cars - they're not human scale.
But when we climb a mountain, we go back to our speed, we go back to a time in our humans time, as opposed to the speed that we are encouraged to live by. So for me, mountains are very important. And this is maybe why now I'm quite happily living in the mountains.
Katherine Byam 8:21
Wonderful. So you also do skydive photography. I think my listeners are probably sweating right now. Tell us about how you got into this field.
Malika Sqalli 8:34
That was an answer to a question about a problem I had. It was during this time, I was doing a project around Latitude 34, which linked my hometown with the town I was living in Los Angeles, and the number of years I was on the planet. This was a very impulsive project I had. It was just an idea that popped in my head and I acted on it. And the line of the road, the yellow line I was tracing on the road became a metaphor for life. And then I played with that concept and I shot pictures where I was tracing the line because sometimes we don't know where we're going and we have to trace it.
At times we fall off the line. I wanted to depict how the sky's the limit or ask whether the sky is the limit. So I get to take my yellow line up and I shot one shot a few images where I flew a ribbon up in the sky and that was just not convincing to me. And I decided I needed to go up there and shoot my picture really in the sky. And this is how I called a skydiving center and told them I needed to learn to fly and I did not measure the consequences of this because I was 37 years old at that time.
I was not completely fearless, you still have filters, the older we get. And I had no idea how to have four licenses for this and that I was going to be petrified for 50 jumps. And but I had a goal I had to target. And I think this was what matters. And fear was anecdotal. And the goal was what mattered. So this is how it started.
And then I did a series of images of their photos because I figured there was no artist who actually did a series of creative images up there. So I would take props with me and shoot and shoot colours, basically splash colours up in the sky in the same way and artists would intervene on the landscape through land art, or paint over a picture. And then the club asked me to do the videos for that tandems. So it was completely unplanned. It was total serendipity.
Katherine Byam 11:06
It's so crazy. I am just excited. I want to grow to do something different now just listening to you. So how would you recommend our listeners approach creativity? How do they embrace creativity if they have what they feel might be monotonous jobs? How would you ask them to open their minds?
Malika Sqalli 11:28
Okay, so I will, I will say before that what we create does, and then I'll say how to tackle this. I'll read a quote from a photographer. And she says that "photographers are investigators, the unconscious obsession that we photographers have is that wherever we go, we want to find the theme that we carry inside of ourselves." So in other words, what I see is a synthesis of who we are.
And what we give to see is also what we are. So creativity is also a way to know who we are. It's a double mirror, we show what we see. But it also shows us. So for this to be creative. We really need courage and curiosity. With courage, we have to drop our filters, we jump into cold water, and it can feel daunting, because somebody might say, this is really bad - what you've done, or it's just not good.
But being creative does not mean we have to be the best, we have to make a masterpiece. And we are masterpieces in the making because we always sketching something that will become better later. And so we have to have the courage to take action. And since ideas, our ideas our answers to questions and they come from a line of inquiry.
Malika Sqalli 13:23
It can be hard that to have people look at what we do, it can be really hard. And that's where it takes courage to do it in an authentic way not trying to be like someone, not trying to emulate, we can be inspired but it will it has to be authentic and come from the heart and from the gut. Curiosity is where we find all the seeds that have the potential to become ideas and artworks.
Malika Sqalli 13:59
And I also think that we are a kind of alchemist, where we take all these seeds, all these different things, all these different elements, and with our own personal little chemical reaction, we produce something new. In the same way when we learn from many people, we make our own idea of something. We don't just copy and paste and creativity is this little magic.
Malika Sqalli 14:36
This is my transformation. This is why we transform things. We take a lot of it a lot of the what's around us and we transform it into our own personal way of expressing what we have to say. Really courage and curiosity I think are what will help your listeners be creative without holding back
Katherine Byam 15:03
Malika, how do we get out of our own comfort zones to get out of our own way?
Malika Sqalli 15:08
I will start by saying that going out of our comfort zone does not necessarily mean high adrenaline, thrill-seekers, thrill activities like skydive and things like this. These activities - they do just that. They give us thrills, and they give us a hit, they give us a kick, a dopamine kick which is why they can get very addictive for some of us. They can be very empowering. They can be very euphoric.
They can have this feeling of achievement which can be very beneficial to get going and get started on things and yes - feel empowered, which we know can have a great carry over in whatever we do in life. However, I am not sure if it really has an impact on creativity per se. I have many fellow skydivers who I would not qualify as creative. So I think that going out of our comfort zone is something that can contribute to creativity.
But it has to be nearly like a way of being a way of life, a lifestyle, and one that is based on trust. And what I'm trying to say here is that going out of our comfort zone does not have to be high, adrenaline does not have to be extreme. It can be speaking up. It can be telling or saying our opinion when it's completely divergent from everybody else. It can be traveling to a country we've never been to and doing it alone. It can be going out in the crowd when we don't like crowds. It can be really soft things softer things.
And this I equated to some kind of character and brain gymnastic. So it's all down to flexibility, creativity comes down really to flexibility. In the same way, as when we learn various languages, our mind becomes a lot more flexible between languages. And we can have don't get stuck. If there is one word we don't understand, we can make it up. So it's really about this flexibility in the way we approach things.
The other thing, I think that is very important for creativity. And I'll quote a critic Lyle Rexer, who told me when I was in a residency where he was taking part. He told me that my as a man, my images take him to a place in his heart, he does not usually go. And this is a bit of that. Out of the comfort zone can also be going within in places we don't normally go. It's this inquiry again that we were talking about the questions. We going to a little corner that we are we don't know how it looks like. We're going to investigate.
And this is one of the keys. And this can only be done with an open heart to be really authentic and really moving in touching. It has to not be driven just by the head and logic and whatever filters we acquire as we grow and go through life. So this is also why I think that artists are heart openers because it does require this attitude. And this is also why I created this group called Heart with Malika with capital to try and help people drive their creativity through their hearts.
Katherine Byam 19:15
I love this. I have been so excited by this. And I'm sure my listeners will want to learn more about you. How can they reach out?
Malika Sqalli 19:23
I have a website. It's malikascalli.com. And I also have a Facebook group where I talk about all things creative and how that can also have a positive impact on everyday life and on knowing who we are. Because when we know who we are, we know where we are going.
Katherine Byam 19:46
Thank you and thank you listeners for joining us for Where Ideas Launch. See you soon.
Katherine Byam 19:54
Thanks for listening. This podcast is brought to you today by the depot virtual service hub. The virtual service hub is our digital transformation strategy service that supports startups needing to optimise their processes and their performance to scale up growth. We also help medium sized firms and modernising their operations and Our services include sustainable strategy, analytics and tech enablement. To find out more contact Katherine Ann Byam on LinkedIn