I can’t stress enough how honoured I still feel to have worked with one of the most well known queer icons of Colour of our time:
Alok Vaid-Menon was in Bonn and Cologne, Germany to perform their solo comedy show during their world tour. I was given the opportunity to shoot the looks and the stage performance.
It truly meant the world meeting this gifted queer poet, that changed my worldview and guided my gaze on myself in the direction of self-acceptance.
ALOK finds words for the state of the world like no other.
They gave a lecture at the University of Bonn, about the importance of having a firm yet expandable self concept and the dissociation city our unhealed selves live in. You will find a snippet of this lecture, I recorded here.
I am still processing that meeting them actually happened, that they appreciated my photography and that even a picture I took of them was used in the french international fashion magazine “Antidote”.
- someone pinch me…! -
Working with ALOK gave me a sense of what it feels like working with other political queer people, that understand and care about the nuances of being in an artistic space together.
It made me reflect on past experiences with harmful people that I am still healing from while it was also giving me energy write down how I want to approach my safer space vision for my photography.
Bonn.
Lecture at University of Bonn.
Cologne.
In Cologne, ALOK shared the stage with Whatever Mike and the intellectual writer and critical thinker Sinthujan Varatharajah / @varathas on IG .
Seeing them full of joy together back stage still fills my heart with warmth looking at these pictures.
