Intimate portraits of social unrest. An interview with Nadia Hafid

Nadia Hafid is one of the most prominent emerging voices in the contemporary comic scene in Spain. Her graphic novels convey a portrait of the fault lines of contemporary society through a distinctive visual economy that functions as the vehicle of social critique. This interview was conducted in the context of the international seminar ‘Drawing Hope in Times of Crisis: Graphic Novels and the Visual Art of Struggle’, held at the University of the Balearic Islands, and it explores Hafid’s engagement with critical issues such as racism, gendered and racialised labour, family dysfunction, and affective and social isolation, which she frames as expressions of broader structural conditions. Addressing her three graphic novels, El buen padre (2020a), Chacales (2022) and Mala olor (2025), the interview examines the distinct graphic strategies that Hafid uses to render visible those forms of structural violence that are often embedded in everyday life. The discussion addresses Hafid’s visual and narrative minimalism, but also her use of tools such as visual metaphor, narrative fragmentation, graphic repetition, visual distance, or a restrained colour palette. Talking about her creative process and her references, Hafid explains how some of these tools are used to create emotional proximity and empathy, while others are used as distancing techniques in order to foster critical reflection. The interview highlights that Hafid’s distinctive visual economy functions not as reduction, but as a means of fostering critical attention to the structural conditions underlying her intimate portraits of social unrest.