Digital art by Sofie, showing the Muslim name of God, Allah, in Arabic script.
We live simply and semi-nomadically, going from location to location traveling with opportunity and season, and, for a long time, in search of the right herbs. COVID changed our way of life, and we eventually gave up jewelry design and herbalism, and have since sought to heal ourselves, integrate ourselves, let Sofie learn to read and write and paint, and for us to settle down to develop a proper business and take some roots in a world that has shifted much and often for us.
We have certain values:
- Play
Sofie has learned what she has learned through play, and learning-by-doing. Her mother turned housework, business, and study into one giant game played over the landscape of an ecology. Sofie was takes to bazaars, cafes and wildernesses to learn. She is also encouraged to play with other children, and we often enjoyed hosting children at our home for art. However, our experiences with this sort of engagement proved to be challenging as community needs and suspicion of us “strangers” outpaced our ability to meet their expectations and needs. We have had a mixed experience, and play has been affected since COVID, and due to incidents of severe violence faced by the mother. This leads us to assert that parent safety is child safety; when parents are threatened and mothers are being attacked and abused, children cannot be brought up safely and sustainably. We had the safest experience in Chitral, Kalasha valley. <3 We have also found the business community of Hunza caring and comforting, but only in the core touristy regions and not in the peripheries. This caveat is important to enable only true expectations for our followers. - Discovery
New discoveries enrich the soul and mind, and we discover new relations, situations, seasons, characters and faces continually. We also make discoveries through books on a vast spectrum of subjects, and through circumstances. We incorporate whatever we come across into our learning, thinking and art. This is not just our way of learning, but also of healing and processing. - Curiosity
The first full sentence Sofie spoke was uttered a day or two after she turned two years old, and it was: “Ye kya hai?”, meaning, “What is this?”. She ran around the room, touching and picking things, and asking, “What is this? And what is this?” This shows her attitude and outlook. Her mother Ramala Hubb’Allah deliberately chose to keep her mind a blank slate, filling it gently with colors, natural experiences and stories. Ramala built on thigs bloc by bloc, step by step, build up the artist’s life and mind. We explored things together, asked open-ended questions, and let the child reach her own conclusions and tell her soul’s own native stories, something that is being lost in this world today as the voices of children are overwritten by the elders and the over-culture. It was much later in life that the society began presenting their narratives and stories–which we resist and rewrite to the best of our ability. This makes us a symbol of necessary defiance in a stale society that doesn’t favor women and child but rather bends towards to egos of older males. This is a subject that we leave to explore on the adult’s site, HubbAllah.com. Feel welcome to explore! - Community connection
In as far as we can, we integrate within the community that we are in, however we have mostly tended to integrate with the commercial people of any area that we have been in. This may be because the nature of the interests of Sofia’s mother is socioeconomic and commercial, and she seeks to connect with people of markets and of trade. This, in many ways, has also proven to be safer as we found, to our dismay and grief, that family and household settings are incredibly unsafe and grievously injurious to guests in the region. - Nature exploration and integration
Working with, playing in, and integrating nature is a key theme of our work. We look at the plants, mineral and animal kingdom, and honor them. We paint for and in the season. We are also discovering seasonal cuisine, and also do environmental stewardship through working with recycled materials, recycling materials ourselves, - Working with hands
It is our deliberate intention and method to work with hands, keeping those motor skills sharp and practiced. This is also how we support the creation and sustaining of a handmade economy, which we believe is almost a moral imperative for our times, and for the growth and depth of humanity– though development seems to be heading in the direction of the virtual at this point. We are rooting for the traditional and the embodied! - Prayer
Prayer seems to be disappearing from Earth and its communities in the favor of staring at our screens. Sofie’s mother grew up staring at the screen since she wasn’t allowed to make art or live a functionally sane life. She transmuted her trauma and lack into creating a new and different life for her daughter. This has still been an uphill challenge; change is not deep-rooted and not fully embodied. Society is in a flux and people even in remote and traditional societies seem to be leaping to the mirage created by the economy of the Unreal, as Sofie’s mother Hubb’Allah calls it. In this time and situation, Prayer tethers us to and keeps us affixed and rooted in the Real, where we strive to abide. Amen. - Story-telling
We choose to tell and listen to stories–from people and from books and of our own generation and inspiration, in order to shape our minds and create our desired outcomes and life. In addition to listening to stories, Sofie beloved tells and writes stories. We have recorded each and every one of them, and plan to write them down and illustrate them, insha’Allah. - Family-centeredness
Sticking close to family and high attachment is a way of life in the mountains, and, to the best of our ability and within our unique structure of a Mother & child pair, we practice this way. The people in our life are often the subject of our discussions and we spend a lot of time thinking how to engage with each, and to give them their due while overall maintaining a safe distance from most people as they purge their old, anachronistic selves out. - Cycle-breaking
While we DREAM of family, love, connection and cohesiveness, let us not lead you into the same dreams that we got led into. We found that reality is sad, broken, hurtful and bizarre. People were lying, injurious, hurtful, deceptive and betraying. We have been through some of the most bittersweet and dangerous experiences of our life at the hands of family and society, and stand in the center in the tradition of Madonna and the child. However Hubb’Allah says that this is because this is a turning point for humanity, and women and children are being turned out and abandoned in vast number, as the outcome of a large and complex series of events where the Men have failed their duties towards the society. Ramala says this is a period of opportunity, for us to break cycles and create new cycles and stories. In particular, women and children need to be honored and centered, and the centering of the male ego and criminality is a tradition that needs to be truncated without forcing the women and children to take on that responsibility. There is hope in both the paternal and maternal lineage of Sofie on that account, and therefore, wonderful new things are to be expected. Amen. <3
Now we have spoken of some themes that are very heavy for a child artist’s website. However, as this project is developing we are keeping an eye on concurrent world events, and also watching the evolution or devolution of people and events in our life, and incorporating that in our learning, our knowing, and may be even in our art.
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This page is written and updated by an adult who monitors and updates this site on behalf of the young artist.