“Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
I was interested in intimacy outside of the sexual act,outside of the sexual and erotic, intimacy as the opposite of loneliness, a communal intimacy of sorts. I ventured to create something around Foucault’s interior androgyny and hermaphrodism of the soul, that which created the homosexual out of the sodomite, a kind of Kenyan queer semiology. This led me to explore what drag meant to Jamie and what psychological androgyny meant to Naddya while waxing my favourite queers, Frida Kahlo, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Audre Lourde…
The fractal mirror denotes my nod to Foucault’s “Visibility is a trap” which is ultimately the name of the project. While being obsessed with how Nairobi queers navigate Nairobi in this space of being seen only as far as heteronormatively allowed I wanted to celebrate the space we have to reinvent ourselves within our own circles. That’s why the images are named after discarded names that my friends and I no longer use.
“Diana Daisy”
“Donald”
“Gabriel”
“Jonathan”
“Sam”
