NASO Interviews: Myriame Dachraoui
On the Mediterranean Imagination
“In the narratives of my work, I naturally draw from personal experiences, my family history, for instance. As I’m deeply interested in how we perceive the world and how storytelling shapes that perception, I love to recreate a surreal universe inspired by local folk tales and North African legends. I don’t directly reference them, but they certainly play a part in my imagination.”
Beginnings and Self-Portrait
Born in 1994 in Tunis, where she continues to live and work, Myriame Dachraoui trained as an architect before devoting herself fully to painting. She often describes herself as a “colourful forensic mermaid,” a phrase that captures both her fascination with the sensuality of color and the analytical eye she brings from her architectural background. While her grandmother had once prophesied that she would become an artist, Dachraoui herself locates the beginning of her artistic life in 2022, when she consciously stepped back from architectural practice to focus on her canvases. Rather than abandoning architecture, she sought to represent it differently: to explore its emotional and symbolic dimensions in ways that design itself could not permit.
Inspiration and Atmosphere
Dachraoui’s visual imagination is steeped in cinema. She speaks of films that linger in her mind for their surreal or even unsettling atmospheres: works where sound, color, and staging converge to build tension and mystery. This cinematic sensibility infuses her own paintings, which often unfold like dream sequences in which time, light, and memory overlap. Her narratives draw naturally from her personal history and family experiences, but they are also nourished by the collective imagination of North Africa. Folk tales, myths, and local legends subtly inhabit her worlds, shaping the contours of her surreal universes without being explicitly referenced. Through these layers of influence, Dachraoui constructs a visual language that oscillates between the intimate and the mythical.
Mediterranean Layers
The Mediterranean, with its history of overlapping cultures and civilizations, forms the symbolic heart of Dachraoui’s imagery. She views Tunisia as a place of extraordinary cultural density: a confluence of Phoenician, Amazigh, Arab, and Jewish influences that has produced a heritage both complex and deeply inspiring. In her paintings, these layers emerge through recurring motifs and signs, often borrowed freely from local visual culture. One such symbol is the fish, long associated with protection in the region, which she uses as a quiet emblem of belonging and continuity.
Myth, Femininity, and Heritage
Recurring symbols: Phoenician boats, women’s bodies, playing cards function as part of Dachraoui’s personal mythology. Among her current fascinations is the figure of El Ghoula, the monstrous female from North African folklore who lures young women away from safety. Dachraoui connects this legend to the concept of the “art monster,” as described by writer Lauren Elkin: a woman whose creativity and desire defy societal expectations. Through El Ghoula, she explores femininity not as virtue but as power, danger, and transformation.
Other symbols emerge from more intimate narratives. The playing cards, for instance, once belonged to her father and remain among the few objects she kept from him as a child. They reappear in her paintings as markers of absence traces of a lost figure, transfigured through imagination into visual poetry.
Between Tunis and London
Dividing her time between Tunis and London, Dachraoui navigates two cultural worlds that nourish different aspects of her artistic life. London offers her access to a vibrant international art scene, while Tunis provides the solitude and rootedness necessary for creation. She describes her studio in Tunis as her “bubble,” a space where ideas crystallize and production takes shape. It is also the environment that most directly informs her subject matter: the city’s textures, stories, and atmospheres remain the emotional core of her practice.
Cover Image:
Courtesy of Paul Mesnager