Tawsen turns chokran into a webtoon about moroccan diaspora and transmission
Created with Papegaai, the two-episode webtoon gives life to Aïna and Sara, two characters born from the visual world of Chokran and shaped by the album’s themes of gratitude, heritage and home.
Created with Papegaai, the two-episode webtoon gives life to Aïna and Sara, two characters born from the visual world of Chokran and shaped by the album’s themes of gratitude, heritage and home.
With Chokran, Tawsen is extending his music beyond the album format.
The Moroccan artist from the diaspora, born in Italy and based in Belgium, has launched a two-episode webtoon created with the Belgian studio Papegaai. Released on the Papegaai app, the project turns Chokran into a mobile-first, animated and interactive narrative, allowing the album to continue through image, sound and story.
But the starting point was already there.
On the Chokran album cover, Tawsen appears surrounded by four women dressed in blue, the blue of the tabsil taouss, the peacock plate often found in Moroccan homes across the diaspora. They were part of the album’s visual identity, but they had no stories of their own.
The webtoon changes that.
Aïna and Sara were created with Tawsen as a way of giving these silent figures a voice and a life. Aïna embodies the mother figure: family, roots, tradition and everything that anchors a person. Sara embodies youth: diaspora, immigration and the act of inheriting a story while carrying it somewhere new.
Between them, the project gives form to one of the emotional tensions at the centre of Chokran: where you come from, and where you are going.
The two episodes are shaped by the wider universe of the album, including its blue tones, peacock imagery, Moroccan references and symbols of home. But the creators also focused deliberately on the album’s core themes: gratitude, heritage and transmission.
Each episode was written around one song.
Episode 1, centred on Aïna and released on 3 August 2026, was built around “Azul”, described as the rawest and most intimate moment on the album. Its emotional register matched the mother figure and the story of roots, memory and heritage carried by a generation.
Episode 2, centred on Sara and released on 9 August 2026, was shaped by “Nor”. Its energy and movement reflect Sara herself, young, in motion, and carrying the music forward.
The songs are not only inspirations for the story. They are directly woven into the sound design of the episodes. As readers move through the webtoon, they are also stepping inside the music.
That is where the project becomes more than a visual extension of an album. It uses the webtoon format to create another relationship between artist and audience, one where music can be read, watched, heard and experienced as a world.
The album Chokran is a project of gratitude and transmission. The webtoon continues that idea through another form, turning Moroccan diasporic memory into narrative space. Migration, family, home, inheritance and invisible links between generations become part of the story, not only themes behind the songs.
For Tawsen, this also positions Chokran within a wider movement of transmedia storytelling, where music is no longer limited to a tracklist, a cover, or a video clip. With Papegaai, the album becomes a narrative universe that can grow between musical projects.
The result is a project that asks what can happen when the visual symbols surrounding an album are treated seriously, not as decoration, but as characters, memories and stories waiting to be developed.
With Aïna and Sara, Chokran is no longer only something to listen to.
It becomes something to enter.
Photo : Papegaai