Mariane Ibrahim

I was trained, actually, in the UK in the marketing and communication field.

And that aspect of selling, promoting, telling a story of any product was something that I was...

you know, I tend to say I'm still good at.

And so when in the marketing world, somebody tells you this does not exist, then it's an opportunity.

It's a market that you create.

Yeah, we're storytellers.

We love to tell stories.

I grew up in Somalia from the part of the north.

There's nothing very much to entertain you.

There's no TV, you know, there's not a sort of a cinema and you just sit around with your grandmother and your family and then they tell you a lot of stories.

So yeah, so I've always been chatty.

I've always had that problem at school.

Most of the things were like, she talks too much.

I have a comment on anything.

So I guess the visual art kind of made me a little quiet, a little more quiet, which means you sort of speak with the images and the moving images as well.

I'm very grateful for all of the refusals and all of the times and all of the rejections because I wanted to develop some sort of an art community when I get into Seattle.

So I was reaching out to a lot of galleries there and proposing the possibility of presenting artists of the African diaspora.

to which they were responding there was no market, they were not interested.

And I think one email that I have received basically told me that I had no chance and it was not going to work, which resulted the next day in getting my license to open a business.

But I love to transgress the no's.