Kmar Douagi, a visual artist and facilitator whose practice is rooted in documentary and social engagement, will lead the online participatory workshop. At the intersection of image and narrative, her photographic work explores deeply real aspects of everyday life, aiming to question, connect, and shift perspectives — as exemplified by the image she chose to accompany the visual for the Cool Noons photo contest.
She explores the transformative potential of photography through collaborative and transnational projects, and is currently being mentored by the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles (ENSP).
Interview with Kmar Douagi
The Cool Noons project explores urban transformations linked to climate change through the lens of heatwave experiences in Mediterranean cities. What role do you attribute to photography in narrating these transformations?
Working on a photography contest rooted in a Mediterranean context — both local and international — with a human, inclusive, and documentary ambition, seems not only relevant but essential to me. The climate challenges we face deeply question our relationship to urban space and collective life. Photography can become more than just a way to capture images — it can be a critical gesture, a tool for commentary and reflection.
It allows us to highlight adaptation strategies, reveal silent narratives, invisible tensions, and forms of everyday ingenuity — a way of reading the city from the ground up, through lived experience.
Your work is described as photography of the everyday — “not spectacular, but profoundly true.” What does it mean for you to tell the story of the city with tenderness and clarity?
I deeply believe that photography should not aim to beautify, but to reveal. I’m not interested in perfect images, but in what they can evoke: recognition, disturbance, a shared memory. Telling the story of the city with tenderness and clarity means accepting its contradictions, shadows, and silences — but also what persists within it: solidarity, adaptability, attachment.
Rather than trying to create “beautiful images,” I aim to guide sincere narratives… (workshop presentation)
Your approach stands at the crossroads of documentary storytelling, social mediation, and collective creation. How do these dimensions interact in your projects?
I don’t separate creation from relationship, or the personal from the political. My work is grounded in attention to context, to people, to stories that emerge outside dominant frameworks. That’s why I design participatory formats.
For me, mediation is not secondary — it’s the heart of the process. It allows for the creation of spaces of trust, where images become a shared language. Through publications, exhibitions, and workshops, I aim to circulate these fragile but powerful stories.
Kmar Douagi is a photographer, scenographer, and facilitator, born in Tunis and currently based in Marseille. Through a practice rooted in documentary storytelling, she creates spaces of expression for marginalized voices. Her visual language is sensitive and embodied, grounded in an everyday aesthetic — not smooth or spectacular, but profoundly true. Her work questions, connects, and shifts perspectives, reading urban environments through lived and intimate experiences, and telling the story of the city differently: with honesty, tenderness, and clarity, while embracing its roughness, contradictions, and silences.
Co-founder of the Uncivilized collective, she designs and leads inclusive artistic projects blending photography, publishing, participatory workshops, and collaborative publications across several European cities. Her work has been exhibited internationally — including at the Rencontres d’Arles, the Glasgow Gallery of Photography, and Loosenart Gallery in Rome — and published in numerous critical and independent journals (MyKali, Simulacrum, The Elephant in the Room, Lusted Men, Al Tiba9). In parallel, she engages in teaching practices focused on situated narratives and collective approaches.
Portrait and Portfolio
• Website
• Instagram
• École nationale supérieure de la photographie
