This is one of the most touching emails we have received. It is signed Roméo:
My new series is entitled: Pourtant les nôtres ont toujours existé (Yet ours have always existed).
It deals with the complexities of constructing oneself while living a dual queer and racialized identity.
In June 2022, I participated in the radical pride of Paris and joined the procession in a non-mixed group between racialized people. It’s an experience that took my breath away. For the first time, I was not alone. Mine were there around me, so numerous. I cried and was comforted, hugged by my people. I took a photo of the sky from this first time and I came away transformed. The project that I present here is rooted in this first real community experience.
Here I deal with the complexities of constructing oneself while living a dual queer and racialized identity. Through interviews with participants, we use their lived experiences as a basis for addressing the system of injunctions/projections imposed on young racialized queers. Systemic injunctions to perform a certain whiteness or at least exemplary assimilation, coupled with exotic and colonial projections locking them into a stereotypical role. We also often experience difficulty recognizing ourselves within the groups to which we belong due to the (generally colonial) invisibility of our queer elders with immigrant backgrounds. Added to this is the virtual absence of artistic and media representation of racialized queer people. In this difficult balancing act, we are pushed to “choose our side”, between white queerness and family closets.
For the photo shoot we worked with a corpus of images chosen by the models, which marked them, touched them, hurt them. These images can come from projections undergone or from chosen representations. These are what we project onto the bodies of the models. The perspective is radically empowering and deliberately provocative. It’s about reappropriating these images, becoming master of the narrative, questioning the posture of the spectator. The approach is entirely designed with the participants in order to gain experience of themself safely and within the framework of their needs, desires and limits, thus allowing them to regain narrative and pictorial agency.
Through these photos we create for ourselves the images that we have missed, and participate in the creation of a new queer and racialized iconography. They are testimonies of our existence, our survival and our richness outside of preconceived itineraries.
This work is designed as transmedia, the recorded interviews are as important as the photos exhibited, the podcast (broadcast on Spotify) is a powerful tool to better understand the images and experiences of the participants, to immerse themselves in their subjective experience. It is a work in progress, never ending, which is enriched by the participation of new models.
At the antipodes of an external discourse of pity around amalgamated experiences or a pseudo hegemonic neutrality, this work is at the heart of my artistic practice, offering a situated point of view and addressing our minoritized existences from the inside. It diverts and appropriates the codes of an official art which never ceases to plunder ours to make a demonstration of life, richness and strength in the multiplicity of our postures and our experiences.
Roméo
IG @ro.meo.photo
