Sophia Al-Maria

Sophia does not inhabit the margins. She tears boundaries apart. Between desert and asphalt, between Bedouin lament and the twang of country guitar, her work maps a terrain of scars where her ability to intertwine personal experience with global narratives creates an intricate web of meaning. A scream dressed as a laugh.

She navigates complex topics like colonialism’s lingering shadows, identity as battleground, and cultural decay with such finesse that even the most challenging subjects become unexpectedly accessible. This conversation is a journey through shattered mirrors, where the future is not a polished utopia but a wild frontier where pain and laughter share the same root. To resist is to reimagine, thus art becomes an act of somatic disobedience. Al-Maria writes with fire in her stomach the questions the world fears to answer. Like Nancy in “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, she reminds us that resistance begins when we stop flinching — and start fighting back with the weapons we’ve forged from grief, humour, and clarity.

Her vision is not solitary, it’s a blueprint for the kind of solidarity we need now: one where rage and care coexist, where the final girl trope is no longer the last one standing but a chorus of voices refusing to vanish. She trades hope for honesty, and proves that staying alive isn’t about winning, it’s about refusing to disappear. This isn’t just storytelling, it’s autopsy.

It’s a rare privilege to engage with someone whose words leave an indelible mark. This is survival as creation. Resistance as rehearsal. When the world demands you choose between nightmares, she builds a third option: burn the script.

I grew up between Seattle and the Gulf — on paper worlds apart, but to me, the threads were always there. When I first started writing, I was obsessed with tracing the overlaps: American car culture and Gulf drag racing, hyper-consumption, that restless horizon chasing energy in both places. And then there was humour: bone deep, often dark, shared by my working class American family and my Gulf family, displaced from Bedouin routes crossing oil-rich land. That legacy of forced movement, of being made second class on your own land, runs deep. It took me decades to understand the machinery behind it, especially American soft power in the Gulf’s present.
There was a time I’d get excited by kinship: they pimp rides here like in LA! Now it makes me ache. I see mimicry where I saw connection. My father loved country music, lonesome wailing odes, and Bedouin music isn’t far off. One string, one voice, a universe of sorrow. There’s a simpatico quality, but it comes back to class. The more I learn, the more I see this isn’t cultural, it’s class. Western narratives pathologise or exoticise the rest. It’s othering, and it’s still happening.

Well, I’m not entirely sure I buy the idea of opposition in that rigid sense, it sounds fascinating. But when it comes to imagining alternative futures, I do think it’s a political act. There are no two ways about it. Be it writing laws that anticipate situations or eventualities or fantasies of the future. The writer’s perspective is always there and that inherently has a politics to it. Maybe not always in the direct, protest banner sense, but in the way it opens up space for something else: something unapproved, unanticipated, unpermitted, unsaid. Video games actually offer a compelling entry point here. They’re one of the few mainstream narrative spaces where multiple outcomes can exist simultaneously, where players can try on different ideologies or outfits or ethics, fail, start over, or even choose refusal as a strategy by just letting the game be over. That kind of world building can be radical. It reminds me that fiction, when done with intention, isn’t just escapism — it’s rehearsal.

I’m not very interested in utopias or clean futures. I’m interested in futures that hold grief and contradiction, that aren’t based on resolution but endurance. Futures where care isn’t luxury. Where softness isn’t weakness. Where rage burns without being weaponised or commodified. When dystopia feels like the default, maybe the most radical thing is imagining a future where we’re still here, still weird, still flawed, but holding each other differently.

That’s such a great question, especially because I actually rewatched “A Nightmare on Elm Street” recently and fell down a bit of a rabbit hole. Did you know there are three alternative endings? One of them reveals it was all the mother’s dream, which I found strangely moving, especially as someone with a white mother through whom my first perspectives of myself and the world were programmed. That detail has always felt significant to me, and funnily enough, a lot of my close friends also have white mums. It’s like we’re drawn to each other by this shared, unspoken experience: the woman who raised you might love you deeply, but she’ll never quite understand what it means to move through the world in your body. Mothers, after all, shape our reality, but sometimes they’re dreaming a different dream. And when I saw that ending, it struck me that much of the nightmare we’re in now feels like someone else’s projection. A dream authored largely by white men who once imagined they could fix the systems they built. The problem is they failed miserably even for themselves and still won’t give up their power.

There’s another ending where Freddy is literally driving the car. That one hits too, because sometimes it really does feel like evil’s just got this grimace or grin at the wheel while we’re all trapped inside the car. I’ve always loved horror films, especially the ones that honour the final girl. The trope matters. It’s not about survival for the strongest; it’s survival for the most emotionally attuned. Often the one assigned female at birth. Often androgynous. Often queer-coded. The one no one expects to win. That’s where the power lies. Which is why I was truly frustrated with “Nope”. I mean, really? You take the sister out of the climax and let the brother have the final glory? There’s literally a giant vagina in the sky sucking everything up and spitting it back out and we’re supposed to pretend it’s not about this man’s unresolved issues with his mum? It’s not cinema, it’s therapy with a budget and we all get subjected to it. But seriously, humour and exaggeration are crucial in my practice. They’re not just tools of resistance; they’re weapons of disarmament. When reality is a nightmare, laughter becomes a survival strategy. Not because it makes things better, but because it gives us breath. And breath gives us space to act.

The people I admire most right now are the ones speaking out loudly and clearly, despite risks, on Congo, Sudan, Palestine, the Uyghur crisis. People like Francesca Albanese, or that incredible Irish woman who speaks at the UN with such unapologetic fire, Clare Daly. It’s people like that who remind me that feminism, real feminism, includes trans women, includes the displaced, the disappeared, the damned. That’s the kind of final girl energy I want to bring into the world.

Honestly, whatever. People who’ve never known or loved a trans woman. Yes, it’s generational, but that doesn’t excuse it. What’s happening in the US is terrifying. Trans people are targeted in eerily familiar ways. “First they came for…” echoes constantly. History repeats in real time. Black trans women and trans women of colour disappear most frequently. They endure the same sexual violence as cis women, with less protection, less visibility. We’re in the same boat. That should forge real solidarity.The older I get, the more I hold space for complexity. I feel strange compassion for men traumatised into domination. It doesn’t excuse harm, but unlearning is everyone’s work. Feminism must hold all this. Otherwise, what’s the point?

There are so many deep rooted misunderstandings about Islam, many deliberate, shaped by centuries of Western projection, going back to the Crusades. What’s often erased is that Islam, historically, contains radically feminist lineages. Unlike Christianity, where figures like Mary Magdalene were diminished or demonised, the Prophet’s wives were central to political and spiritual life. His first wife, Khadija, was a businesswoman, older than him, and guided his early life. He was an orphan, and I truly believe he had deep respect for women.
There were golden eras: Andalusia, the Umayyads, the Baghdad Caliphate, where women weren’t just present but powerful: court poets, advisors, warriors. There are records of trans women too. One of my favorite epics is “Zaat al-Himma”, just recently translated into English. It tells of a woman kidnapped as a child from what’s now Yemen, raised as a goat herder, and eventually rising to become a general in the army that had once captured her. There’s a moment where she unknowingly fights her father, neither recognising the other until afterward. That scene, and the whole story, is a powerful reminder of how many female and queer heroes are lost in Western history.
As for my own experience, strangely, I felt safer in the Gulf than in Cairo. I know that’s not a popular thing to say. But in the Gulf, gender segregation created a dynamic where men were almost afraid of women. They don’t interact much, there’s reverence, but also ignorance. They’re often mama’s boys. In Egypt, it was different. I experienced a lot of sexual violence, especially during and after the uprisings. But that violence wasn’t random. It was systemic, encouraged by the state to keep women off the streets. Because historically, every revolution that’s succeeded has had women at the front. And regimes know that. Israel uses similar tactics, at checkpoints, in prisons, where the threat or use of sexual violence becomes psychological warfare. Thus, when the West points to Islam as oppressive, I always think: what are you really seeing? And what violence are you trying to hide?

Terrorism is framed as something that only happens in Arab countries. But in Europe, I’ve seen films like “Les Filles d’Olfa” or documentaries where young people of Arab descent explain feeling alienated from both Western and Islamic cultures. They don’t belong anywhere, at the exact age when belonging matters most. That vulnerability makes them easy targets for radical groups. But that happens in any culture. A white guy with a rifle on a school rooftop kills thirty people, and it’s blamed on mental illness, not terrorism. The double standard is brutal. I guess it’s part of a Western strategy as well. 

Dense is absolutely the word. I carry the weight of both sides — American and Qatari — and all the contradictions that come with it. I’ve been unpacking that through a long-term project: a TV series I’ve been writing for years, set just before the First Crusade. I could’ve earned a PhD in medieval history by now, but instead I’m still neck deep in this beast. The show starts during the Pax Dei, the Peace of God, when European leaders agreed Christians shouldn’t kill Christians. But violence, like sex, was allowed from Monday afternoon to Friday night. The hypocrisy is wild. And as the feudal system crumbled, power structures grasped for new enemies. They pointed East. “Go fight over there, they’re not Christian.” Sound familiar?
It’s no different now. The indulgence isn’t land, it’s oil. The same supremacist logic, cloaked in democracy or divine mandate. Some of it stems from bizarre readings of stories: like Jacob and Esau, which I’ve been thinking about a lot. Jacob, the farmer, tricks his blind father into giving him Esau’s birthright. When they reunite, Esau forgives him, offers kinship. But Jacob declines. That refusal, “I’ll give you livestock, but I won’t walk with your people” feels like the blueprint of modern supremacy.

And I see that rift in personal ways too. That deep hospitality in Arab culture, no one fights over the bill, generosity isn’t transactional. You feel it in Spain too. But the further north and west you go, it gets contractual. You owe me. I owe you. There’s less softness, less surplus. Therefore, when freed hostages say they were treated with respect, that they weren’t harmed, I don’t think that’s Stockholm Syndrome. I think it’s a glimpse into a cultural logic Western narratives can’t, or won’t, recognise. Because it doesn’t fit the script. But we need to tear that script up. Completely!

I’ve been discussing Palestine within art institutions for a long time. It’s interesting to see who was asked to remove their name from the Art Forum letter. No Arab I know, or anyone with an Arab or Muslim name, was asked to do so because we were almost seen as a lost cause by those trying to dissuade us from the most basic humanity. Those controlling the narrative project the idea that the bad guys are the oppressed, who’ve suffered for nearly a century. Any act of violence by an oppressed person is often framed as self-defense. In the art world, friends who took a stand for the first time faced the most backlash, especially those who signed the letter or spoke out in academic circles, particularly in places like Germany. I’ve been clear about my stance for a long time, but I have a friend who was fired, and I worry about my friends in academia in the US. Many others I know had shows cancelled or opportunities taken away. Those opportunities never came my way either, they never materialised. I’m most impressed by those who, despite this, continue to push forward, especially Israeli conscientious objectors and non-Arab or Muslim artists who are vocal about it. That takes immense bravery, far more than being an Arab artist with a clear point of view. I wasn’t born with that perspective; I didn’t grow up in an anti-Zionist household, quite the opposite.

Yes, absolutely. My work has been shaped, challenged, and at times silenced because of its political charge. One example is my video piece “Beast Type Song”, where a significant section explores Palestine and how my understanding of the region was shaped, often in contradiction. I was raised by my aunt, my mother’s twin, who was a Christian Zionist. I grew up hearing, unquestioningly, that Israel has a right to exist. The emotional dissonance started young. In 2000, when I was living in the Gulf, I saw Muhammad al-Durrah killed on television, shot while hiding in his father’s arms. That image never left me. I stayed up all night writing, something cracked open. I now recognise that moment as the beginning of my life as a writer. I was 17, and I realised I’d been lied to my entire life in the US.
In 2002, during the Intifada, I was studying in Cairo. Some American friends had just returned from the siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. They told me about witnessing a Palestinian man being shot by a drone. I didn’t even know what a drone was at the time, they described it as a flying camera with a gun attached. CNN later reported it as “caught in crossfire.” That was the second rupture. After that, there was no going back.

As for censorship, it happens both loudly and in whispers. The most direct case I’ve experienced was in 2017. I was nominated for an inaugural institution’s prize, I hadn’t applied for it, but I won. It came with one hundred thousand dollars. Then people started contacting me: had I checked the funding source? It was rumoured to be connected to Qualcomm stocks, which in turn supported Israeli military tech. If that was true, it raised ethical questions — not just for me, but for every artist on that list. So, I proposed an idea: what if I used the money to fund scholarships for five Palestinian students to attend the Cuban Film School? Within 24 hours, I was called anti-Semitic: on the phone, directly. The board wouldn’t go for it. I was told I could release a PR statement, but they had to “vet everything.” So, I wrote a letter, gracious, but clear, that I couldn’t accept the prize. Instead of releasing the letter, they quietly removed the award altogether. The prize just disappeared from their website. That wasn’t just censorship, it was erasure.
I didn’t work in the US for years after that. I didn’t even realise it had become a kind of informal blacklist until a Chinese curator said to me, casually, “That’s probably why you haven’t worked there.” I had a show at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, which was beautiful, but it’s regional. Then yes, I’ve felt it. Not always dramatically, but systemically. And the silence that follows is often the loudest part.

Yeah, I’m curious to see how things unfold here in the UK, where I live now. I think it ties into the whole idea of American soft power, the notion of individualism. People believe they could one day be as rich as Elon Musk, which is laughable to me. If you look at the richest people in America, like Jeff Bezos with two hundred billion dollars, and then Elon Musk with four hundred billion dollars, how does that even work? There’s this belief that anyone could become that wealthy, which is why Kendrick Lamar’s song “They Not Like Us” really sticks with me. That idea has been in my head constantly, even though he’s a very wealthy man too. The myth of the American Dream is incredibly toxic. My father worked as a human resources manager at a Cuban hospital in Doha, and many of the Cubans I met there still dreamed of moving to America. I was shocked by it. Even though I’ve been to Cuba, and I get it, it’s tough, really tough.

Exactly. It’s like indentured servitude. It’s very hard for anyone to leave. But let me explain the treaty between Qatar and Cuba, which is a funny story. The previous emir, who was very close to Fidel, he even spoke at his funeral, arranged for a secret Cuban hospital in Doha. When Fidel found out, he was upset. He apparently didn’t understand why they needed a hospital in secret. That’s an apocryphal story, though I like it. Going back to my point, I was shocked that Cubans still want to go to America. My stepmom would say, “I have the American Dream,” and I’d say, why? Spain is good for you, you speak the language, you’re a nurse, and you’re legal now. But the American Dream is such a powerful thing, it’s tied to Manifest Destiny, this idea of supremacy that goes way back. It’s a projection of white supremacy that, for some reason, even non-white people believe they’re part of.

And it’s also, again, a class-based issue. White Americans believe they’re superior to others.

That mentality shows in different ways. My sister worked at a Native American school where kids would refer to themselves as Native, not First Nations like in Canada. They had their own private school funded by casinos, a smart way to resist colonisation. But my sister saw a lot of racism and xenophobia, even towards recent immigrant teachers. There’s a lack of solidarity, even within Native communities. While the American Indian Movement once aligned with the Black Power movement, there was still chauvinism within that. I think revolutions falter when leaders get what they want. The Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist group, solidified my thinking. They believe those with the least power should lead, regardless of race, gender, or class. That’s the only way forward, and while it’s still a niche ideology, I try to talk about it whenever I can.

We need to be honest with ourselves about our feelings, experiences, and values. And when we’re pushed, we need to fight for them — if not for ourselves, then for those we care about. If you won’t fight for yourself, who will? That’s what gives me hope. Lately, I’ve been thinking about what art can and can’t do and how it might still be of use. That’s where my focus is right now. Art can help me survive under capitalism, but community is my priority. Doing actual work with people I love, who maybe haven’t had the same education I’ve had.

When I was younger I went through phases driven by powerlessness and unacknowledgement, but I don’t feel that way anymore. Over time, it became clear that there’s an infinite well of ideas, and we’re stronger together. I love writing for other artists and collaborating. The work with Lydia Ourahmane in “Grey Unpleasant Land” was unique. We were invited by Robert Leckie for two shows, but instead, we created a new body of work together. We explored why we were in England, a place neither of us had historical ties to. The work pushed us to view things from different perspectives, and I learned a lot from her. We’re still collaborating and are dear friends. That shows that working together is not just possible but rewarding.
I recommend this book for anyone interested in collaboration “Love in a F*cked-Up World” by Dean Spade, a trans lawyer. It explores relationship anarchy and non-monogamy, but more importantly, it’s a guide for movements on how to repair relationships when they go wrong. Broken relationships often hold movements back, and this book is necessary right now.

I first encountered the omega point through Teilhard de Chardin, who imagined it as an evolutionary climax, where all consciousness converges. But I was more interested in the omega wolf, the bottom of the hierarchy. The scapegoat. The exile. The one who absorbs the tension of the group.
In “Bitch Omega”, I was exploring what it means to occupy that position, not just as an individual, but as a people or as a story. History often demands someone hold the burden of being last, erased, disbelieved, ridiculed. But the omega wolf isn’t passive. It watches everything. It knows the group better than any alpha. That hyper-subjective perspective, witnessing and enduring, is a kind of power. Not glamorous, but essential for survival, for truth telling.

It’s interesting you bring up Sebald. I picked up “The Natural History of Destruction” from my landlord’s shelf not long ago, on post-war Germany’s psychological landscape. It left a strange imprint. Sebald explores a collective refusal to reckon with the Allied bombings and mass civilian death. But really, he’s charting national dissociation — a silence, not just cultural but bodily. An inability to grieve, to metabolise. He writes around pain without naming it. Reading it feels like holding your breath inside someone else’s blocked nervous system. Then yes, it’s a book about the body, even if it doesn’t say so directly. About what happens when a body politic can’t feel. When trauma, unmourned, calcifies into ideology.
I’ve been thinking about that, especially after yesterday’s protest against the UK Supreme Court ruling, again declaring gender binary as doctor assigned. Erasing trans people, intersex realities, and ancient gender knowledge. Protests feel different now. People are more guarded, less willing to be seen. The optimism of earlier uprisings has shifted heavier, more alert.
A man, white, British, fifties, came up to me. A photographer. We spoke about why people resist being photographed. Then he said, “I didn’t know until this week that trans people were the first the Nazis came for.” I said yes and disabled, autistic people too. Then he said, “What pisses me off is that it’s being done by people who look like me.” I told him: you’re perfect for infiltrating. Interrupting. Those who are safe, who resemble the aggressors and aren’t yet targets, carry a different responsibility.
That moment made me think again about Sebald, about remembering correctly. Not sentimentally or abstractly, but through the nervous system. I think we’re surrounded by ruins, not just architectural, but psychic, emotional, epistemic. The Constitution disappearing from the White House website. Historical timelines collapsing. Memory flattened into slogans. We’re not only in the ruins, we’re unmaking our archive.

My interest in ruins is emotional, not just archaeological. I use them for scrying, for unfixing thought. Sometimes it’s a margin in a used book, a letter never sent, or just walking through London’s time-traveling architecture. These encounters stir something, a feeling I didn’t know I had, an insight that bypasses reason.
In Arabic poetry, al-atlal means ruins, but also an abandoned abode, a place visited only in longing. There’s grief in it, but also fertility. Something must disintegrate for something else to grow. Therefore yes, I think we’re in the ruins, not just of Western culture, capitalism, or “civilisation” (I share your hesitation), but of a reality that never had our consent. A dominant narrative is collapsing. But alongside it, beneath it, another world is alive. Not post-civilisation — para-civilisation. The underbelly. The ur-world. Disintegration isn’t destruction. I fear annihilation, yes, but not decay. Dust, after all, is full of memory. Full of seeds.

Right now, the project I’m most engaged with, and excited about, is “The Pits”, a collaborative space I’m opening with Lydia Ourahmane at Somerset House. It’s a participatory installation running through August, free to book for anyone who wants to use it. What excites me is its commitment to rest, refusal, and reconfiguration. We’re transforming the space into a black box that bends and shifts, a container for what’s unresolved: rage, grief, fatigue that doesn’t fit into productivity. A space for emotions and realities that can’t be metabolised by self-care trends.
Moreover, I’m preparing to perform my second ever live show with the band Moin at the Barbican on May 30. We collaborated on three songs for their latest album. I wrote and will perform one, “Lift You”, based on a text I wrote in response to a telegnosis time report. The music sits somewhere between noise, math rock, and grunge. I’m proud of it, and of bringing language, rhythm, and embodiment into live space.
Beyond that, the deepest work I’m doing is on myself. I’m trying to evolve into a version of me big enough to hold what’s coming. That means unlearning. During the pandemic, I had to face the reality that being a writer, or someone whose main tool is language, doesn’t always feel essential. That cracked something open. I’ve been drawn toward healing work: somatic modalities, dearmouring, first aid, embodied practices that root me in the present. I don’t want to keep floating in this meat sack, I want to land. And perform from that place. That’s the project I care about most.