About XABACA

Xabaca was born from the collaboration of Novact (BCN), Al Fanar (Madrid) and Jiwar (BCN).
It wants to support female Arab creators for two reasons: their role in social transformation through art and for the double oppression they face for being artists and women. Very often, cultural creation is a tool to visualize and cross red lines of power structures and facilitates the questioning of the status quo. Female creators face a very specific type of repression. Patriarchy and the defiance towards the status quo generate a particular form of restraint which affects women in a different way than it affects men. The public and the political role of female creators is reduced, by minimizing the distribution, exposure and advocacy of their products.
Xabaca puts forward the realization of artistic works linked to this whole context, taking into account the importance of gender as fundamental aspects of the defense of freedom of expression and free creation of female Arab artists.
In the mean time, Jiwar-NovAct-AlFanar work to give a feedback to the Catalan and Spanish society spreading the word of the artists and contributing to break social stereotypes around a fixed image of “the Arabic women”.

Xabaca is structured into two different areas:

• Artistic development: to enhance art and creativity as means to combat gender discrimination, censorship and social injustice.
• Empowering activist aspects: to strengthen the capacities of the artists to increase their role in social change. This is done by participation in workshops and putting them in touch with the international support network Xabaca, established in 2017.

The project offers a scholarship to diferent artists from diferent countries to do an artist residency in the city of Barcelona, create new networks and spread around their experiences and work.