Through her creative psychoanalyses of the world around her, Mimivirus aims to reform the meaning of her Arab heritage, uniting it with her Pagan spirit and trans identity through her rebellious music. Blurring fantasy and reality, her distorted image is an explosion of the self, unapologetically creating a dialogue on industrialized hierarchies from transphobia to totalitarianism.

Describe yourself in 3 words
Peaceful, satanic, universal.

What’s the story behind your name?
Mimi has been the name that I've walked on this earth with for a few years – it’s a short diminutive of my birth name, so it just felt organic and true. And then virus came because I knew that I needed an ending to my name – if I had a beginning I needed an ending. Virus felt organic too and really tapped into the sickliness that I feel within me. People perceive certain things as unnatural or ill and unhealthy, but I always felt like a lot of what was considered unhealthy is healthy and vice versa. I later found out also that Mimivirus is a classification of viruses and is actually for the largest viruses in the world! How fitting.

What/who are your strongest creative influences?
I have so many creative influences, but if I had to pick a few it would be fashion and pop culture icons who really had a vested interest in disturbing people and making those disturbances feel so good! Leigh Bowery, Marilyn Manson, Missy Elliott, Bjork, and blackout era Britney Spears are just a few that have touched my soul.

What’s the relationship between your cultural background and your paganism?
Good question. My paganism (aka my Satanism) is something I just live and breathe in the everyday. I think about it a lot but I’m also just subconsciously living in it all the time, so it’s always at the back of my head. Therefore the relationship with how I live my life and my cultural background is hard at times; the Islam and middle eastern culture of today doesn't take kindly to entities of my kind. However its only that way because of colonialism and violent traumas and histories, and so I aim to destroy that and to reunite trans-human with Arab-ness. I reconnect the wires from my culture to my spirit, and grow that Lebanese tree of life so large that it will birth other trees.

Your music has a strong sense of rebellion, particularly through your lyrics, which comment on the oppressive chains of our current systems. Does your music predominantly serve the purpose of protesting?
I would say a lot of it has a purpose for protest yes, but most of all I would say my music serves as a psychoanalysis of the world and of the universe we live in, and I give that to the listener. To be honest I started making music to use it as a tool to influence people to know truths of the soul. I felt like I have some piece of the truth within me, and so I wanted to share that with fellow creatures. Once they've seen the psychoanalysis, it’s up to them as to what they want to do with that truth.

Your striking Instagram seems to be an explosion of the self. To what extent do you use social media as a means of performance?
I use it as performance but more so I use it to carve out the image of the world that is inside of me. I create the ideal image of the fantasy truth world that I want to live on the outside. I see it similar to my Trans in that way, and I think transness is trailblazing the way for people to transpire their true selves from their inside to outside. It is performance as everything is, but it is more authentic and real than often how I feel when I'm not immortalised on the screen.

Your incredible clothing explores avant-garde whilst your makeup experiments with Satanism. How do you feel these themes interact?
I always see makeup as an emblem or logo, and so I enjoy using satanic symbols through my makeup because it feels emblematic of my spirituality and my inner peace. My fashion I do also feel is emblematic of my Satanism but mostly is a representation of nature and alien in various incarnations – I think the marriage of the two is something so beautiful and sexual.

Your images tend to be edited in order to distort your body. At what point do the images leave your reality and morph into something completely out of this world?
For me in my world, my distorted images of my body are truer to my reality than the form my body takes in the physical world. I love plastic surgery! I feel like plastic surgery is so creative and one of the most intensive forms of expressing your inner self outwards, so I see distorted myself online as a form of cyber plastic surgery.

Your music, images and poetic captions on Instagram meld to become anarchic comments on issues such as capitalism, oppression and industry’s destruction of the environment to name a few. What is the relationship between your images on social media and your music? What comes first?
What comes first? The art forms are the reincarnations of the messages I speak of and social medias of which those messages are viewed from. If I were not Mimivirus I don’t know if I would have social media in general. Certain media platforms I rarely use anymore so I really focus on only Instagram; I have many issues with social media as it stands today becoming more dictatorship like, however Instagram seems to be the platform where the most people likeminded to me gravitate to. All the art forms I use are equal to me – fashion, music, poetry, performance, makeup. It all is a part of the tree of life that I try to grow, known as Mimivirus.

Would you describe performativity as a way of life?
Everyone is performing all the time. Performance is life. Yet different types of performance humans are untrained to see as such, we forget that it is performing too. We are all models of clay molded into whatever our psyches want us to be.

What else can we look forward to from Mimivirus?
I am coming out with more music in 2020; I'll be releasing an EP in the early months of 2020 and maybe another music project after that. This EP will be coming with music videos and many other visuals and hopefully many performances in as many geographical locations as possible! Other than that, for now I am secretly growing my entity as Mimivirus in ways I can’t speak of currently… but just know that I will keep molding and remolding and destroying and rebuilding myself, all for you to see on the screen!