While exploring the psyche, I was also earning a Master’s in International Relations. I wanted to understand not just human consciousness, but what shapes it — geopolitics, memory, religion. Even atheists are steeped in religious discourse; even inner wounds often echo colonial histories. That’s why I can now work with people raised between cultures, religions, revolutions.
As part of my journey, I worked with Maghrebi immigrants, listening to their stories of displacement, trauma, and hope. Their pain was never just personal — it was geopolitical. I also conducted PhD research on Latin American artists who resisted dictatorships through conceptual poetry, installations, performance — the art of defiance as a form of historical memory, repair, and civic resistance — a way to encode protest when speech is censored, to remember when archives are burned, and to activate collective consciousness when public discourse is silenced.
Meeting personal pain was what first led me to explore the psyche. But it was through art that I discovered the tools to investigate it — not as aesthetics, but as a language for what cannot be said aloud. While interviewing Latin American artists who defied dictatorships, I met not classical painters or performers, but journalists, political leaders, and social visionaries who turned to art because the public space had been blocked. When words were censored, metaphors remained. Art became resistance — not just expression, but survival.
At the same time, I worked closely with Maghrebi immigrants in Europe. Their stories were soaked in silence and shame, yet their pain wasn’t individual — it had been authored by policy, migration regimes, colonial residues. These encounters helped me see how much of what we carry is not "ours" — but inherited from history, produced by social constructs, embedded in ideologies.
Through these experiences, I began to notice recurring myths, patterns, archetypes that quietly script our lives.