From MAGA to Nike, photographer subverts well-known branding to powerful effect

There’s a story that artist Mous Lamrabat likes to tell, about when he first became obsessed with brands. He was 14, a teenager born in Morocco and living with his family in Belgium. Lamrabat and his eight siblings were working class kids who wore plain clothes, long before plain clothes were adopted by the quiet luxury crowd and thus became cool. Back then, the cool kids, they were covered in logos; symbols of a club he desperately wanted to be a part of.

“As a kid, you just want to belong,” he remembered. So the teenager took a hat his father wore to mosque and embroidered it with a Nike swoosh. With needle and thread and a logo born 5,000 miles away, the people’s republic of Mousganistan was founded.

“Mousganistan,” a manifesto, an exhibition title, and now the name of Lamrabat’s first book, is a “utopia of multiculturalism and unconditional belonging.” It is, as all utopias are, more an idea than a place. It acknowledges all the identities we wear through life, and says, “it’s ok to not be one person,” explained Lamrabat, now 41. We think we have to decide which person to be in any given moment, he added; “American” outside the home, Arab inside, for example. Mousganistan says, “It’s fine. Let’s be both.”

This idea has guided Lamrabat’s photography for years, manifested in sign and symbol. Lamrabat rose to prominence by melding Western iconography — especially its symbols of consumerism — with people and places from Africa and the Middle East. His work combines gauche branding with fine-art sensibilities, operating as a cultural melting pot ripe with playful contrast. In Mousganistan, a Tuareg tagelmust (headscarf) is made from Ikea bag straps, women sport henna Wu-Tang Clan logos, and niqabs look like Lakers and Bulls jerseys. Because why not? They are, at their core, heightened reflections of the cultural osmosis and lived experience of millions of people every day.

The mischievousness is the point. But as his profile has risen, has Lamrabat run into any issues with the companies his artworks co-opt? “Never,” he said. “A lot of the time, I’m contacted by these brands or creative directors to congratulate me. They’re a big fan.”

“In a way, I’m still thinking, ‘Hey, hire me,’” he added, laughing.

Some have. The Belgian Moroccan artist shot a campaign for WhatsApp, has had work appear on the cover of Vogue and Esquire, and been profiled by GQ. But there have also been lean periods, he admits, and a year when he didn’t pick up a camera. He’s hustled and hustled, he explained, using friends as models and never working with big budgets (“this actually made my work stronger”).

His debut monograph spans eight years of work — a long time, and a long time coming, as he admits he put off the project for years. “It felt like so much work … Now that I’ve made the book, I realized that was true,” Lamrabat joked. But he recognizes it as a big moment: “Everything that I’ve done so far led me to the point I’m at now.”

Unsurprisingly, one word has followed Lamrabat around: iconoclastic. “I don’t even know what iconoclastic means,” he said, chuckling. “I’ve always lived in a bubble and created in a bubble. It was only when I started doing interviews that people started (mentioning this).”

Lamrabat concedes he’s no art connoisseur, though he is a lover of fashion, where “symbols are so important lately.” He describes influencers proudly displaying even the most throwaway items adorned with brand logos on social media. “I almost feel like (fashion has) become a kind of religion by itself. Like a cult.”

His art hasn’t shied away from religion, particularly the flowing fabrics of Islamic womenswear. Bright and bold (in part, a result of an eye condition limiting Lamrabat’s color sight), these playful interpretations nevertheless read as respectful of his heritage. (Perhaps his most provocative work, of a veiled model wearing a Make America Great Again cap, titled “I Just Did,” was not intended to be read as explicitly religious, he noted.)

More recently, Lamrabat has taken to draping fabrics over models for a more secular interpretation that focuses on silhouette and the quality of the textile. He explained he wanted to remove the attracting but distracting presence of faces from his work. The idea came to him after a tough period in which he wasn’t proud of much of his output.

“Me and my girlfriend (now fiancé) were driving through the desert and it was so beautiful,” he recalled. “I wanted to make it so simple; something pure. We shot one photo and it looked amazing.” He began singling out more interesting fabrics and giving them focus, “creating fashion without fashion.”

Doing so rekindled childhood memories. “When I was little, my parents gifted fabrics, which I never understood,” Lamrabat said. “Why would you not at least give them a dress or something, you know?” But he grew to learn of their significance, and the stories these fabrics tell, and how cherished they were by his own culture and others.

Lamrabat has found other ways to manifest the personal in his work. He is Amazigh, North African tribespeople with a flag comprised of three horizontal stripes: blue top, green middle, yellow bottom, representing sky, mountains and desert. Over the stripes is a red letter in the Tifinagh language, symbolizing resistance, that also looks like a human figure, head in the sky, feet in the sand. “If you look at all of my photos, almost all of them, there’s blue behind the head,” he explained. “That’s why I like shooting outside.”

Despite all these throughlines in his work, Lamrabat’s book possibly closes a chapter of his life. “Maybe everything until now was Mousganistan,” he said, “me trying to find solutions for different worlds we live in.”

“I’m at a crossroads,” he shared, “and I need to make a decision (about) what’s next.”

As daunting as that may sound, he has some ideas — none of which involve photography. “I’m not a photographer,” he insisted. “The camera is just a creative output for my ideas … I want to try to not always think in photography, if that makes sense.”

He’s wary of any endeavor that limits his creative freedom. “There should be no rules when it comes to the creative industry,” he argued, and bemoaned artists “losing our rawness” in commercial work, rife as it is with polish and compromise.

He floats getting into sculpture, although he’s not sure where to begin. Let the practical details follow; Lamrabat has always been an ideas guy anyway, and that’s not going to change any time soon.

“What Mousganistan is, is a big construction of bridges,” he said. “I would love to keep doing that, because I truly feel that if we focus on the things that we have in common instead of the differences, it can bring a lot of people closer together.”

“Mousganistan” is available to buy now.

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